In "Cole Fire: Yale is set to ditch Taliban Man and may hire a notorious anti-Israel professor," John Fund in the Opinion Journal (thanks to Romy) brings us a Rahmatullah Update: the former Taliban spokesman may be on his way out at Yale, but not because anyone there has had an attack of conscience.
This is abundantly demonstrated by the fact that they considering hiring the dhimmi academic Juan Cole. One small indication of Cole's sense of academic objectivity is indicated by the fact that he printed his comrade-in-arms Mark LeVine's reply to my article about him, but declined to publish my further reply (yes, I did send it to him). (For the record, I would not perform the same discourtesy. If either Cole or LeVine dared to debate me, I would print their full remarks here.)
Cole also purveys howlers such as this: "Dangerous falsehoods are being promulgated to the American public. The Quran does not preach violence against Christians." Then he quotes a few verses that indeed do not preach violence against Christians, but, predictably enough, he makes no mention of Qur'an 9:29, which -- you guessed it -- preaches violence against Christians: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
As Juan will tell you, the People of the Book that Muslims must fight in this verse are primarily Jews or Christians.
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....
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."
Read it all.
Damn it! Harvard is gonna get another one.
But what do you expect? If the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities, Maria Rosa Menocal, has not been taken to scholarly task for her ill-informed feelgood "Ornament of the World" (with no mention of the relevant authorities, such as Levi-Provencal, in her bibliography), but rather has just been rewarded with a Sterling Professorship (one of four such appointments, and the only one outside of science, with its more rigorous no-nonsense standards), that says a lot about Yale.
As for Juan Cole, everything Martin Kramer has written about him should be digested thoroughly by those at Yale who are even thinking of touching Cole with a ten-foot=-pole. Then read around: go to the Yale Library, check out Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, David Margoliouth, Arthur Jeffery. Start with those four. Or, if you prefer, read the samples of a few dozen great Western scholars of Islam, those included in the tremendously useful "The Legacy of Jihad." Ask a few European scholars -- say, Alfred de Premare, or Hans Janssen -- or for that matter those who have received their scholarly formation in Europe but are presently in the United States, such as Bernard Lewis, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook -- what they think of the level of Cook's "scholarship."For that matter, since the subject at hand is "contemporary" political developments, surely Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya should be asked (for there they will be truth-tellers) what they think of Juan Cole's "scholarship."
If this charlatan is appointed, it would be a final nail, or rather several final nails, in several coffins. One would be the coffin of MESA Nostra, and the American government would simply have to set up institutes to teach Americans about Islam and the Middle East, going carefully around the universities -- or perhaps carefully vetting every department that would wish to get in on th emoney. The second coffin, a far more luxurious affair (possibly on display at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home), will be that of Yale itself. Universities live and die now by phony "prestige" and by working up would-be students into a frenzy about it, and keeping "in touch" with Alumni to remind them of how prestigious their prestigious university prestigisously is, and how all that prestige comes at a price -- the price that generous and loyal alumni, basking in that never-ending "prestige," should be happy to pay, and pay, and pay. (Have you gotten a call, or ten, or fifty, from your university yet? Have you had the good sense to tell them to stop their endless begging, and you choose not to swell their endowment still further?). If a charlatan, a complete nonentity, is appointed in the "full light of history," when his work can be easily compared with that of real scholars (Jeffery, Snouck Hurgronje, Schacht, etc.) of the past, and present scholars -- Cook, Crone, Lewis, De Premare, Janssen -- can give their opinions (and don't tell us that John Esposito, or Roger Owen, or Hamid Dabashi -- please don't tell us that these have been the people supplying references, and of course there are also the apologist-lite school of such as Roy Mottahedeh). For god's sake, this kind of thing cannot continue.
Donations do not matter to MESA Nostra. But they do, very much, to Yale, and it should be made to suffer, suffer, suffer, if the apotheosis of MESA Nostra and all that is wrong with it, one Juan Cole, is rewarded for his non-stop nonsense by being elevated to the "prestige" of "prestigious" Yale. It is bad enough that the Mearsheimer-Walt parody of scholarship is allowed to go about the world as a "Harvard" product (the imprimatur was removed too late). To have "Professor Juan Cole" of Yale -- that's more of the same.
It may not be possible to re-create an atmosphere in American universities, or in other universities of the Western world, in which disinterested study, rather than transparent apologetics, is offered to innocent students. Certainly the number of schools where such study is possible has diminished over the past 30 years. Esposito is the rule, not the exception. But one should at least try. And administrators at Yale, and members of other departments, such as the history faculty at Yale, now have a duty to inform themselves fully of the extent of the scandal, and not to permit the fellow-travelles of MESA Nostra already ensconced at Yale to manage to smuggle in one more of their number. This was, incidentally, tried recently at Harvard Divinity School by Leila Khaled, trying through her tools William Graham and Diana Eck, to push through the appointment of Omid Safi. Fortunately, she was foiled. Surely those pushing, pushing, pushing for Juan Cole -- because he is one of them, and they are with him all the way -- can also be foiled at the last minute. They must be -- for the sake of Yale's innocent students, and for the continued support of Yale. For all of the faculty will suffer, in the end, from a decline in financial support that such an appointment, made if the relevant department (Middle Eastern Studies?) is allowed to run wild, will at this point, and fortunately, automatically trigger.
They might start by googling the phrase "MESA Nostra." They can even, if they wish, enter the "MESA Nostra Contest." Yes, thweir entries will be given special consideration.
Many universities are sadly in a state of deteriorating scholarly standards and dwindling worth of scholarship, as Hugh points out.
Is the academic decline a harbinger of the decline and ruin of the civilization?
Not everyone at Yale is enamored with Cole:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=32755
Never in the history of mankind have so many risen so far on so little. This is the age of mediocrity.The modern academy is no longer the cultural center of the west, and is no longer committed to anything resembling dispassionate scholarly excellence, but is has become the redoubt of so many destructively untalented partisain hacks and apologists for this and that trendy cause. To answer Eliyahu's question I would venture to say that the academic decline is a harbinger of the decline and ruin of the civilization. It seems that the only qualification as an academic in elite western Universities is some kind of hatred for the West, its histories,peoples and its cultures.
It is quite encouraging to see more and more attention being given to the sad state of academia by the blogosphere. It is also quite entertaining when MESA NOSTRA 'scholars' eagerly expose themselves.
Here, Dr. Silverstein provides his take on Mr. Cole's petition at his blog
Gallery of the Obsolete Academics. . .
Join the club!