In PJ Media I take apart the latest farrago from a leader of the academic left.
…University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, showing an imaginative reach that would arouse envy in J. K. Rowling, blames Roof’s murders on … Pamela Geller and me. He reveals how uninterested in truth and rational analysis the academic Left and the “Islamophobia”-mongers really are….
Cole grandly announces:
…[Breivik’s] passions were whipped up … by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose ‘Campus Watch’ is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).
That Breivik was a lone psychopath, not the vanguard of an army of “right-wing terrorists” stirred up by Pamela Geller and me, has been for nearly four years now a keen disappointment to Cole and his comrades.
In their need for bogeymen, they have no alternative other than to keeping trotting him out. They hope that their readers won’t notice his murders were singular and not part of a movement, that they took place years ago, and that Breivik himself criticized me and the others who are supposed to have incited him to homicidal rage for being “to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance.”
In other words: Anders Breivik hated us for rejecting violence, which according to Juan Cole we’re supposed to have goaded him to commit.
Even more devastating for Cole’s argument: contrary to Cole’s claim about Dylann Storm Roof’s insane “manifesto,” Roof never once mentions me, or Pamela Geller, or Geert Wilders, or Marine LePen, or Daniel Pipes, or Islam, or Muslims….
Cole, for all his handwringing about our baneful influence, would never dare debate me or Pamela Geller or anyone else he is so intent to defame.When one has as willingly and even eagerly foregone the use of the tools of genuine intellectual discourse in favor of propaganda and defamation as he has, one fears taking them up again, particularly in a debate setting. When one has become used to playing Julius Streicher, it becomes more and more of a stretch to play Abe Lincoln (or Stephen A. Douglas).
He knows, in other words, that he’d get waxed. The truth has a way of coming out, despite the best efforts of people like Juan Cole to obscure it.
Read the rest here.