From the good news / bad news file. From John Fund, WSJ:
Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s luck is running out. Eight weeks ago the Taliban diplomat turned special Yale student made a media splash on the cover of the New York Times magazine in which he proclaimed: “In some ways I’m the luckiest person in the world, I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale.”
But the continued outrage over the news that an unrepentant former official of a criminal regime whose remnants are still killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is part of the Ivy League is catching up with him. Yale is about to establish tougher standards for the program under which he is applying to become a degree-status sophomore next fall, and the consensus is that Mr. Hashemi won’t measure up.
Taliban Man’s days as a Bulldog look to be numbered. But Yale may be about to stir up new controversy as it appears to be on the verge of offering a notorious anti-Israel academic a faculty position.
[…]
Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who became so frustrated at their alma mater’s refusal to answer questions about its Taliban Man that they launched a protest called NailYale, say they are encouraged. “The notion that there are ‘moral purposes’ to an institution of higher learning is a refutation of the culture of nihilism that led Yale to welcome Hashemi in the first place,” Mr. Taylor told me. “Without admitting or confronting the full error of its decision, I think Yale is laying the groundwork to reject him, without looking like they were pressured into it.” Ms. Bookstaber agrees, and notes that if Yale now admits Mr. Hashemi as a full-degree seeking student it will be inviting a fresh firestorm of outrage from the 19,300 students who applied to Yale’s 2010 undergraduate class but were rejected last month.
Meanwhile, Yale faces a new challenge. In the next few days the university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies.
Mr. Cole’s appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. “He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary,” says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole’s postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories.
In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that “when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud.” Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering. He calls Israel “the most dangerous regime in the Middle East.” That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy. In an article titled “Dual Loyalties,” he wrote, “I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party,” namely Israel’s right-wing Likud, which was the ruling party until Ariel Sharon formed the centrist Kadima Party. Mr. Cole claims that “pro-Likud intellectuals” routinely “use the Pentagon as Israel’s Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.”
[My emphases]
Fabulous! And predictable: any outcry over the welcoming of the Other at Yale was sure to be muted at best, as it represented a collision of progressive intellectual mandates: the celebration of cultural diversity (which elevates the Other to almost talismanic status), and the committment to identity politics (which grants special social and political status to “oppressed” groups). In the end, that Hashemi represented a regime that was notorious for executing women in soccer stadiums and burying homosexuals under heavy rock walls, therefore, presented a unique clash of ideological principles—one that Yale seems to be finally grappling with by affecting a compromise: they will rid themselves of the anti-woman / anti-gay Talib (using a pretext Clint Taylor discusses here; more here) and counter that “loss” by hiring a virulently anti-Zionist professor, one whose pronouncements about both Iraq and Afghanistan have been routinely wrong, and who is able to avoid the too frequently-appended progressive epithet of “racist” by virtue of turning his conspiracy-mongering onto one of the few groups still considered fair game for such “elite” slurs: the “Israelis”—and their “neo-con” and “Likudnik” enablers in the US, some of whom run the government, others of whom (through the powerful Israeli lobby) are instrumental in shaping policy designed to keep the brown man from having the freedom to push Israel into the sea, as is their historical right.
Paul de Man would have been so proud!
Fund continues:
Last January, Mr. Cole participated in a “teach-in” at Yale that could have been an audition for his possible hiring. According to the Yale Daily News, he told students that U.S. efforts “in helping create a constitution for the ‘new Iraq’ have increased factionalism.” He concluded that “this is a recipe for continued social turmoil and continued global war.”
Mr. Cole says that he is often unfairly attacked for being anti-Semitic, when in reality he claims he is only critical of Israeli policy. But Michael Oren, a visiting fellow at Yale, notes that in February 2003 Mr. Cole wrote on his blog that “Apparently [President Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon’s ass.” Mr. Oren says “clearly that’s anti-Semitism; that’s not a criticism of Israeli policy.” (Exit polls showed that 74% of the Jewish vote went to John Kerry.)
Mr. Cole appears to be the only prominent academic in America to have embraced “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a highly controversial paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. Mr. Cole told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that the paper argues the “virtually axiomatic” point held by the rest of the world that a “powerful pro-Israel lobby exists.” The result is that “U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed.”
But the paper has been roundly attacked for sloppy generalizations. The two authors claim that “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.” Even Noam Chomsky, a far-left critic of Israel, wrote that we “have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.” But Mr. Cole praises the two professors for seeking “to end the taboo [on discussions of the “Israel lobby”], enforced by knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism.”
[My emphases]
Yes, how brave! We simply must end the taboo that makes it difficult for Cole to express his anti-semitic views in “good” company. Hell, the “rest of the world”—which includes, incidentally, UBL, whose rhetoric on the matter tracks nicely with Cole’s own —has already done it (of course, they base their characterizations on conspiracies about Jews controlling the World Bank and such anti-semitic agitprop as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but that’s beside the point: Israel is a “shitty little country,” and those who have ensconsed themselves in academe here in the US should be allowed to say so publicly, just as the royalty of Europe is able to. After all, what is a “public intellectual” if not royalty?
In fact, we need public intellectuals to tell us what to think—even if it means we take short term draconian measures to make sure people are thinking “correctly”. To wit:
Mr. Cole wants to enforce his own taboos on free expression. In February, he told the Detroit Metro Times that the federal government should close the leading cable news channel. “I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it,” he said in summarizing his view that Fox “is polluting the information environment.” He went on to claim that “in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It’s an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on.”
Got that? In order to save the “information environment”, we must destroy it—a fairly typical attitude of the modern intellectual, to be sure, especially insofar as the actual “news” on FOXNews (as opposed to its opinion and analysis shows) tacked fairly close to neutral and performed much better, in a recent media study, than an entire host of media outlets with which Professor Cole no doubt has no concerns.
And the reason for this is simple: Cole and his intellectual brethren aren’t interested in the free exchange of ideas (or any other marketplace, for that matter); instead, they are interested in asserting their control over what we know, how we know it, and what it means. In short, self-styled “public intellectuals” like Cole believe themselves uniquely deserving of a voice, And competing voices, those that dissent from the great Truths of Cole’s world—specifically, that there are no objective truths (well, other than the evil of Israel and the US, so long as it remains under the sway of the Zionists), only contingent and ascendant narratives that need reinforcement through power—need to be silenced, less they complicate the discourse with a lot of competing tropes that Cole probably views as just so much white noise “polluting the information environment.”
All of which makes him ideally suited for a prominent place in academia—but all of which likewise illustrates just how anti-intellectual and illiberal the academy and its progressive “stars” have become.
Appointing someone as hotheaded and intolerant as Mr. Cole to a prestigious appointment at Yale wouldn’t seem to make any sense. The drive to hire him can be explained in part by the same impulses that prompted Yale to admit Mr. Hashemi. “Perhaps the folks who still want to let Taliban Man into the degree program are also thinking Cole would make a great faculty advisor for him,” jokes Mr. Taylor, the alumnus leading the NailYale protest.
But that might not be a joke. Many Yale faculty members are deadly serious about wanting Mr. Cole to become their newest colleague, and their views hold great sway. Unlike at Harvard, the university president at Yale has no power to veto the faculty’s hiring choice. So even if the admissions department rejects Mr. Hashemi’s application for the fall semester, Yale may jump out of the Taliban frying pan and into the Cole fire.
Now that the courts seem to be tacking back to conservative principles (though legal conservatism has the drawback of showing undue deferrence to stare decisis), the mainstream press and the academy are the last two bastions of “progressive” thought.
Of the two, the academy—given its hiring and tenure-granting procedures, along with its monopoly on higher education (which has itself become a prerequisite for upward mobility, though on a practical level, it is nothing more, oftentimes, than 13th grade)—is the more likely of the two to maintain its ideological dominance, especially now that alternative media has helped balance out and expose the ideological proclivities of the MSM.
And as long as it maintains that dominance—which translates, in the humanities, to a form of attempted de facto indoctrination (taken in the aggregate)—it is up to up to us to shine a light on how such ideological propaganda works.
Because even when the overt ideological message becomes apparent and is rejected by many of the students who are subjected to it, the underpinnings that drive the ideology are too often accepted uncritically—beginning with the surrender of meaning to a drift that unmoors it from intent and sets the conditions for linguistic relativism. Which, in turn, allows for the autonomy and supposed inviolability, outside of “authentic” criticisms granted exclusively to those granted entry into a given identity group, of group narratives and contingent “truths”—a linguistic situation that creates a self-defining and self-contained set of truths that are, in effect, unchallengeable in a multicultural paradigm.
This condition has become the standard for interpretation, even among many political conservatives (see, for instance, both Bill Kristol and the White House’s reaction to Bill Bennett’s use of a racially charged analogy)—which suggests that it has become institutionalized and has insinuated itself as a “truth” that now guides our understanding of language.
But it is a dangerous “truth” insofar as it is improperly understood and lazily deployed. And so long as the academy is able to further this incoherent foundation for discourse, it will be successful in seeding the conditions for cultural doubt and impotence which, in turn, allow the cynical and rhetorically adept to control discourse through a will to power, and allow identity groups to petition for victim status where no offense was intended.
And once that happens, even such staunch liberals as Ben and Jerry aren’t safe….
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related: Nail Yale blog; h/t for the Ben and Jerry’s story, Kadnine.
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update: Kesher Talk keeps tabs on Cole’s “public intellectualism” and “scholarship.”
Harold Bloom turns over in his grave.
OT Jeff but I note the Rockies are tied for the lead…need to work on that home record!
Good post…Cole is a horses ass.
Jeff, that would be progressive ‘thought’, bud. Just trying to keep you on your toes.
shhhh, jeff.
I want Cole at Yale–i’m a wolverine.
Public Intellectual
Is this Professor Juan’s new title as Director of the Thought police?
That’s a good way to start your critique. I’d really love to see this point fleshed out more. Then move on the blog/scholarship distinction. Leave the academic freedom out of it.
Also, make sure that taliban man gets to see the vagina monologues.
I heard Yale’s looking at Pat Buchanan, too, for its Jewbusters Dept. The Department is equal-opportunity funded by both anti-Semites and progressive Jewish alumni, so no worry that the Jewish lobby will close it down on grounds of exclusion. Notably, its classroom maps come in two versions to fairly represent the different sides of the Israeli controversy: one with an outsized Israel dominating the ME and stretching into Amerikka, and the other with the Zionist state sloughed off into the sea. Juan Cole, of course, would teach from both.
T/W nothing, as in I got.
Well, actus, iirc, one of the great criticisms of Bernard Lewis is that he is but a historian of the Ottoman Empire (which at least ended in the 20th Century), so what the heck would he know about modern problems in the Middle East?
I agree with Actus. When the Vagina Monologues are translated into Farsi I guess we’ll have won. I guess.
I like Cole’s “shitty little country” epithet. Thing is, in his view America is the “shitty big” country. So, for Cole, it’s not the size of the country that counts.
His analysis rests on what one could call a “defecatory factor” which, supposedly, is calculated on a per capita basis.
That sounds like messy work, but I think Cole’s proved he’s up to the job.
-Steve
And the academy should totally exclude people that don’t know about modern problems. Or at least give them preferences
Duh. I mena, preferences to the modern people.
Actus,
Let’s not get ambitious. The Adcademy can’t find its ass with both hands now. Let’s keep it simple.
Antisemites like Juan Cole should not be appointed to professorships at supposedly prestigious institutions of higher learning–or high schools for that matter. Better a plumber from Jersey who is not antisemitic than Juan Cole.
Even if said plumber hasn’t quit beating his wife?
And the Academy can’t find its ass with both hands either.
Ditto.
If he’s at Yale, I can shoot him with my Zionist ray gun and control his mind from here. If you hear that he’s been found at Mystic Seaport, naked and barking for smelt, you’ll think of me, won’t you?
Ummmmm…..smelt
The Coalition of the Swilling has a post on the Ben & Jerry’s fiasco, with insight into why this another example of IAEA malfeasance:
http://www.coalitionoftheswilling.net/archives/2006/04/oh_puhleez_1.html
The Daily Ablution demonstrates that in polite circles, “The Vagina Monologues” are now referred to as “The [Mark Steyn] Monologues.”
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/04/we_are_all_pote.html
Taliban Man and now Juan USS-Cole-Justified? Richard C. Levin is the first Jewish president of Yale University. What is he thinking?
You’d have to be daft and damned to send your kid to New Hades, Connecticut these days.
T/W leaders, as in producing both Bush and Kerry. Yale flunks with a 50% score.
When I was in high school in the late ‘80s, the Yale recruiter visiting our school started his presentation by saying that New Haven’s crime rate was going down.
That was the end of me considering them.
This is a pretty lazy argument, Jeff: putting Cole and OBL on the same level; claiming Cole is linked to the Protocols; having him say something he never said; unsubstantiated and illogical allegations; and then some drunken faff about how academia is America’s ideological fifth column…
Frankly, unless you can do better than that, you’re never going to leave blogger high school.
But he could make it into the MSM nuthouse at the WSJ op-ed page.
My favorite Cole piece was his Clinton-foiled-the-Millenium-plot piece, which linked a series of newspaper articles that concluded that the Millenium Plot was foiled mostly through a) stupidity of the suspect, and b) normal diligence of the border checkpoint staff.
It’s still up at his site.
That’s a rather shallow and, I daresay, conveniently skewed reading of my piece, LGFWatch.
First, read the transcript of UBL’s recording, and you’ll see that Cole’s rhetoric about Israel matches not only Mearshimers, but also that of UBL himself. Now, who knows? Perhaps UBL is simply using the Harvard paper the way he did Fahrenheit 911 to pluck out talking points he thinks will sell. I simply noted the similarities. And so the linking on that point of rhetoric is completely reasonable.
After all, I did not say Cole is sympathetic to Bin Laden, only that they seem to share a similar idea about US foreign policy with regard to Israel.
Second, I never linked Cole to the Protocols. In fact, I suggested that those in the Middle East and “the rest of the world” who hold such views as Cole does have the Protocols as an excuse; Cole, on the otherhand—being a potential Yale professor—should know of such nonsense and consequently avoid the kind of conspiracy mongering that such pernicious piffle allows. My point being, what, exactly, is his excuse?
On your third point, I’m unclear: what did I have him say that he didn’t say? Or are you talking about how I interpret the subtext of some of his remarks, which I don’t think is the same thing?
Fourth, what is this about drunken faff and fifth columnhood? As I noted, much of the problem with academy is that it lazily promotes incoherent ideological principles that undermine classical liberalism. Some of this is done knowingly; others is done simply out of bad scholarship.
Which is why I indicted Kristol and the White House for following the same line of thought.
In short, your attempted sleight was juvenile, and based on a litany of easy accusations that you allow to stand in for an actual critique.
Address my points. Or don’t. But don’t try to pass your blase dismissal and accompanying snark off as a substative reply.
The same goes for you, actus. And if you think what I write here is nutty, you’re welcome to stop commenting and go elsewhere.
He’s also called it a long war, which is Rumsfeld’s line. I don’t know what this sort of stuff is meant to show. Perhaps guilt by association. UBL criticized the sanctions regime, so did Ramsey Clark, and so did people in support of the invasion. There are grievances the world over, grievances which people can use for legitimate or illegitimate purposes.
The causal link is lost on me here. Why leave on that basis? I’m saying you’re good enough for WSJ op-ed fame. Why leave such high company?
Wait a minute. Is that an actual LGF Watch turdbag complaining about lazy argument? Sweet mother of David Corn!
…says the freak that can’t stop playing in the toilet. So, how’s tricks, vaara? Smear any soldiers lately?
Regarding contamination of the “information environment”, Cole and his ilk are in for a nasty surprise in coming years.
See my essay ”Charlatans and subversives, meet informational computing”
Well, hell, ditto ditto. Don’t leave me behind.
Wait, fellow progressives! There is still hope for Taliban Man!
WE COULD GRANT HIM TENURE!
Actually, I think US trade laws have more to do with this than any guilt on Yale’s part…you can’t legally import a worker unless you can prove that no American worker can do the same job. And sadly, for Taliban Man, Juan Cole was available…
actus is suggesting that the criticism of the sanctions regime by those who supported the invasion was substantively the same as the criticism of the sanctions by the far Left? And that ideologically neutral opinions about a “long war” are the equivalent of having similar positions on policy? But is claiming Jeff is making lazy arguments?
TW: Projection.
Back to Bill Bennett is no racist, but he is a liar I see.
Using Bill as an exmplar of the distortion of language when done against him fails to recognize the distortions he did in furtherance of drug prohibition.
Well I guess this sort of thing can be excused when the perpetrator is on your side. It does tend to indicate a certain lack of evenhandedness.
Well I am glad to join in where we left off.
I also note that my url –
http://p o w e r a n d c o n t r o l .b l o g s p o t .com/2005/10/war-on-unpatented-drugs.html
Is not welcome.
Bill is a soldier defending rent seeking by the drug companies. Good. He has earned his place in a more moral world.
I wan’t Cole at Yale. That should keep him away from U Chicago (#2 son is a Junior). After all they already have Mearsheimer.
And Bill Bennett is still a liar.
I said that there are legitimate and illegitiate uses of grievances.
And who said Jeff was lazy? I’m sure he works hard on his nuttyness.
coming from the bigotted, racist, jingoistic, bile and hate-filled right, this is hilarious!
how is “Apparently [President Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon’s ass.” anti-semitic? that is a very thin line to cross there. is it anti-semitic because fund says it is? where is the anti-semitism?
here, let me be anti-white for a second: “mr. white’s handlers convinced him he could win the white vote if only he kissed celine dion’s ass more often.”
nope, that’s not anti-white. this doesn’t pass the smell test.
you just don’t like cole because he is anti-bush and anti-rethuglican. since he doesn’t paint israel in a perfect light (like bush) with every word he says, then you rush in with the anti-semitic cry. please leave the false outrage at home.
wingers whipping out the race card – classic. a bunch of white rich men complaining that someone they don’t like is a racist. riiiiiight.
This is a little late to the party…but I see there’s lots of ink here based on Fund’s WSJ piece, but no links to Juan Cole’s response. Here it is. In short, Fund fabricated the Cole quote about Israel being “the most dangerous regime in the Middle East”, and misrepresented most of Cole’s positions.
Fund’s column, where it doesn’t flatly lie, is misleading and nonsensical. His Cole quote that “Israel is the most dangerous regime in the Middle East” is a lie. Cole never said that. The “anti-Semitism” quote is just silly. Cole says that he thinks Bush is “kissing Sharon’s ass” to get the Jewish vote and that its a neocon fantasy, which it proved to be. How is that anti-Semitic?
Fund says cole is a 19th century scholar, he’s written on contemporary issues. Fund also says he’s “given up” scholarship for blog-writing, also untrue given that Cole continues to publish scholarly articles.
And putting Cole in the same class as the Taliban is just crazy. Just because you dislike both of them doesn’t mean they’re the same person.
[I see you’ve been reading your Kos. But really, why be so literalist? I thought you people were supposed to be nuanced? But this can’t be the case, because “nuanced” people know the meaning of “nonsensical.” Which clearly doesn’t apply here. To wit: Cole may write on contemporary issues (hell, Umberto Eco does movie reviews and writes articles for Wired), but that doesn’t mean he isn’t, for academic purposes, a semiotician. That is, he has a specialty for which he is hired and in which he has been trained. Cole’s is 19th c.—though he, like me and a host of others, has written on contemporary Islamic culture and trends. So? He’s been wrong consistently, as I noted in my post, which would mean he is qualified academically to indoctrinate students with the thesis “anti-Zionist blowback caused by US foreign policy is the source of all Islamist discontent”—a position that, until very recently, ignored the stated position of al Qaeda (though bin Laden has recently adopted a similar set of talking points).
[And the Talib “comparison” makes several points that you seem to gloss over that are germane to Yale’s decision making—not to Cole himself, necessarily. So please, take the faux outrage elsewhere – ed]
Mathew 24:6- Their will be wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that your not alarmed, for these things must happen, but the end is still to come. {Jesus will return my friend in the flah of a light} I also came here tonight to bring you some other news. Jesus loves youmy frirend. And accepts abundently into His fellowship circle. John 3:16 my friend- For God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten son and said , whoever follows me sha’ll never perish but have Eternal life. {Final words- Seeing isn’t believing- Believing is seeing!