Martin Kramer writes in the Sandbox:
One of my missions is to save readers of Juan Cole's weblog from his errors. (This has the potential of becoming a full-time job.) The latest one comes in today's posting about Shehzad Tanweer, 22, one of the British-born suicide bombers from Leeds. Cole first announces that his investigation is in full swing: "I have been trying to trace the influences on and organizational contacts of the July 7 bombers in London." This intensive Ann Arbor-based Google sleuthing produces the following:His family is originally from a Punjabi village near Faisalabad, Kottan (Chak number 477). When he first visited his ancestral village with his father in 2002, aged 18 or 19, Tanweer was working with Tablighi Jamaat. This organization is peaceful and devotes itself to recovering lapsed Muslims for a fundamentalist version of Islam. [Cole's links--MK]
Cole then goes on to speculate that Tanweer probably was recruited by a leading member of Jaish-e Muhammad, which is connected with Al-Qaeda. Cole: "The evidence [!] I can find is that Tanweer's passage into terrorism began with Jaish-e Muhammad and its allies, one of which is al-Qaeda."
But what if Tanweer's "passage" began even earlier, with the "peaceful" Tablighi Jamaat in London? In fact, no serious terror analyst today accepts Cole's simple characterization of the Tablighi Jamaat, which is spread through Europe and America. Two full years ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the Tablighis: "A Muslim Missionary Group Draws New Scrutiny in U.S." It offered this quote from the deputy chief of the FBI's international terrorism section: "We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States, and we have found that Al Qaeda used them for recruiting, now and in the past." Six months back, the Middle East Quarterly ran an article assembling a mass of evidence on the involvement of Tablighi Jamaat activists and alumni in a stunning range of terrorist groups and operations. (Most famously, the Tablighi Jamaat looms large in the saga of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban.") According to the MEQ piece, "Tablighis preach a creed that is hardly distinguishable from the radical Wahhabi-Salafi jihadist ideology."...
So error compounds error in the Cole-mine. Two weeks ago, while Britain's top forensics experts were just setting to work, Cole offered this: "Britain's South Asian Muslim community is almost certainly not the origin of this attack." In this latest posting, the professor again sends us to the wrong starting gate. The clueless Cole is the Inspector Clouseau of Middle Eastern studies...
Read it all.
Inspector Clouseau's clumsy bumbling and failure to see what was staring him in the face was cause for mirth. Cole is as Kramer describes, requiring full-time scholarly sweeping up afterwards (and putting back the pictures that had been knocked off the wall, and the books that have falledn off the shelf onto the floor), but he is not quite such an innocent bumbler -- rather, he is like Inspector Clouseau, if Inspector Clouseau had been around during the German Occupation and collaborated with those gentle Germans in that very special building on the rue des Saussaies.
"As plain as the nose on your face." Some are looking into the horizon and ignoring what's on or right in front of that proverbial face. Idiots!
I wrote to Herr Cole after the Iraqi elections about his indefensible anti-American pre-election invective and his "joke" comments... I suggested it was highly bizarre for a history professor to be predicting the future. For those who don't remember or didn't know about it, he's one of the marxist bullsh*tters that was predicting bloodbaths in the street. In my opinion he was HOPING for bloodbaths in the streets to smear America with. He's the one who famously predicted that turnout would be extremely low, and called the electoral process the US had set up with the Iraqi provisional government was a "joke.' In his response to me he totally sidestepped the issues I had raised about his bogus predictions, his erroneous comparisons.
The details aren't so important, but I was stunned when he suggested that the Iranian electoral system was clearly far superior and legitimate over the Iraqi one we had set up, and held the 1997 Iranian 'election' (sneer quotes mine) as a paragon of democratic process...
His sole criterion for this was "if an upset can occur, it's a sign of democracy...." While this is logical in a theoretical way, it illustrates how abstract and deluded such ivory tower eggheads can be. He said "[the Iraqis] didn't know the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting..." and couldn't stop criticising the huge number of choices presented. There were over 111 parties fielding candidates, which sounds like a good idea for a constitutional convention, but he surmised there were too many, and anyway the voters were "instructed [as to] whom to vote for anyway"
Perhaps it had eluded him that this was for a constitutional convention, not a general election as the so-called Iranian 'election' was... what was he thinking? That it would have been better to have hand picked candidates by the mullahs and sheiks, as they do in Iran? Simply put, YES... These pseudo-liberals are really nothing but fascists...