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.