Posted 3/30/2005 10:12:00 PM

ANOTHER Scholarly Source and Colleague of Juan Cole

We recently documented the deep involvement, identification, and
collaboration of Prof. Juan Cole, who is serving as reigning "Rais" of the
Middle East Studies Association, with one Dennis "Justin" Raimondo, who
edits the anti-American pro-terror antiwar.com. Raimondo fabricated a
conspiracy "theory" about how supposedly dem Joos were the real ones who
knocked down the World Trade Center all to make bin Laden and his 19 Saudi
hijackers look bad. This theory is now staple lard on all neonazi web
sites and some Stalinist ones too, like Pravda, where Raimondo writes a
regular column. Raimondo seems to be determined to act out in his own life
the script from Kevin Abrams' book.

Now Raimondo and his ravings are ordinarily not worth discussing outside
the clinic, and are of interest here only in the fact that Prof. Juan Cole
is a follower and admirer of Raimondo, publicly thanks and compliments
Raiomondo, and publishes his own articles on Raimondo's web site.

At first, we assumed this was just a singular slip in judgment on the part
of our learned professor of Middle East political correctness. Surely Cole
does not know what sort of crackpot Raimondo really is, right?

Wrong!

It turns out that Raimondo is NOT the only far-left-neofascist
conspiracist crackpot with which Cole makes common cause and is on
intimate collegial terms. We checked out the links on Juan Cole's own
personal web site and blog. There we discovered among Cole's list of
"Political and Academic Weblogs" the weblog of Kurt Nimmo.

"Academic" weblog? You may recall that Nimmo is the employment-challenged
New Mexico photographer-wannabe who may or may not have been canned from a
job at his local Walmart's photo lab, who may or may not have finished
high school, the fellow who insists that because of "the neocons" (by
which he means Dem Joos) he just cannot find a job - unlike the many
millions of illegal immigrants who cannot speak English and all find jobs.
Nimmo is a regular columnist for Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch, and
has been moonlighting as a columnist for Uruknet, the web site base of
Iraqi pro-Saddam exiled Ba'athists.

Nimmo, who makes Raimondo look like a Harvard Dean, claims he is not
really a columnist for the Ba'athist site because he only publishes his
columns there. We counted 40 Nimmo columns on Uruknet. Nimmo also insists
the pro-Saddam site is really run by Italian peace lovers and not
Ba'athist Iraqis, and my guess is his evidence is that his friends there
say "Marhaban, We arrrr Italian Beoble Insh'Allah". And yes, the Saddamist
Uruknet also comes out to endorse Professor Cole, Raimondo and Nimmo, the
merry threesome.

Nimmo has as long a track record of justifying terror, spin doctoring
al-Qaeda, and promoting crackpot conspiracy theories as Raimondo, and
Nimmo is just as openly anti-Semitic.

So the big question for the University of Michigan is how can it be that
one of its profs is someone who regards Nimmo as one of his bona fide
"academic" colleagues and links his personal page to such a critter, a
prof who openly identifies with Justin Raimondo, a prof who is the hero of
the week for the Iraqi Ba'athists. We would ask the Middle East Studies
Association a similar question, about how can Cole be its President under
these circumstances, but we fear we have already answered out own
question.

We are wondering if the next academic weblog and academic source for his
research that Prof. Cole will name will be Rense.com or David Irving's web
site.

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/another-scholarly-source-and-colleague.html

Posted 3/29/2005 12:46:00 PM

1. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17520
Juan of a Kind
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 29, 2005

The new head of the Middle East Studies Association, Professor Juan Cole
from the University of Michigan, has responded on his own web page to the
in-depth expose of his bias I published recently in Frontpage Magazine.
In that article, Cole.s long history of distortion, ignorance, and bias
was carefully documented. In particular I challenged the Cole Doctrine,
which holds that all terrorism is due to .occupation.. I showed that most
terrorism has nothing to do with .occupation,. that most occupation does
not cause terrorism, and that terrorism is more often the cause than the
consequence of .occupation..

Cole is apparently unable to defend his record against the criticism
contained in my piece and instead complains, in a column on his own web
page, that he was a .victim. of a .GoogleSmear.. By this he means
critical analysis of what he writes, which then gets cited and reposted on
the web, something he dislikes (but can.t answer). He is upset when web
commentators publish correctives to his extremist and unfounded views, and
then these show up whenever someone googles his name in the web.s best
known search engine.

But more importantly, this is all a bit like the libelous pot calling the
kettle black. Cole.s habitual response whenever anyone exposes his errors
and bias is to whine that he is being .smeared.. But Cole has a long
history of smearing and threatening respected scholars like Daniel Pipes
and Martin Kramer, who . unlike Cole . are careful with the facts.
.Googlesmearing. -- as opposed to the fact-filled documented analysis I
wrote in the above FPM article -- is hardly a .new way of discrediting a
political opponent,. as Cole described it. Indeed, Cole and his leftist
friends have been doing it for years.

In his attempt to defend his indefensible record, Cole writes, .The
GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the individual
sound like an idiot.. In all candor, we do not think anyone needs word
changes nor Google to assist in making Juan Cole sound like an idiot.
Noam Chomsky has said, .Juan Cole is a very serious and knowledgeable
analyst.. Need we say more?

Cole.s .idiot. reference is actually meant to refer to a small piece of my
original article (before I corrected it), which mistook a spoof of what
Cole writes for the real thing. But what does it say about Cole that.s
hard to tell the difference? In any case, unlike Cole, I am happy to
acknowledge an error when I make it, since it is not . as it is with him .
the very substance of my discourse.

No sooner does Cole complain about .dubious facts. in the Frontpage piece
about him and about his being a victim of .GoogleSmear. than he himself
decides to illustrate GoogleSmear for his readers by performing it against
me. Thus, his first and main defense of his good name is to repeat a lie
about myself invented earlier this week by his crony, superior ship.s
officer, and editor at antiwar.com, Dennis .Justin. Raimondo. Cole
clearly regards Raimondo as a legitimate, authoritative source of
information, while complaining that his critics rely on dubious sources.
We counted 14,400 web pages in which the names Juan Cole and Justin
Raimondo appear together.

One is known by the company that one keeps and Cole keeps intimate company
with Raimondo, who is best known for fabricating a conspiracy theory
reprinted on neonazi web sites all over the Internet about how Jews
supposedly knocked down the World Trade Center to make poor bin Laden look
bad. Raimondo has even self-published this theory as a .book.. Cole
obviously has no problems being associated with a crackpot like Raimondo
nor with citing his libelous ravings as .authoritative.. And then he
complains that we at Frontpage Magazine are responsible for his own
damaged reputation.

Cole rests the better part of his .self-defense. on labeling me .an
Israeli defender of the terrorists (sic) around the late extremist Rabbi
Meir Kahane,. the fellow who set up the Jewish Defense League. So what is
the source of this invention reported with scholarly seriousness by
Professor Juan Cole? Why, it is Justin Raimondo himself, of course! In
fact, Cole thanks Raimondo profusely on his web page for smearing me as a
supposed Kahanist.

The only problem is that I am not. Raimondo.s evidence for this smear
against me is that he googled my name and the word .Kahanist. together,
and discovered two articles of mine in which I used the word .Kahanist. in
the text. But that was all he found. In neither article did I express
any support for the Kahanists or Kahanism. Talk about Googlesmears!
Cole, also accuses me of posting comments under a false name on a web
bulletin board and accuses me of using illegal drugs, which is equally
fanciful and absurd.

Not only have I never been a Kahanist, but - on the contrary - I have been
a critic of Kahane and his organization for well over 30 years, and have
been attacked by the Kahane movement on more than one occasion. But such
facts cannot be expected to deter the scholarly head of the Middle East
Studies Association, Juan Cole, and his conspiracist mentor Raimondo in
their zeal to discredit my analysis of Cole's actual positions and
performance. Cole, by the way, is as fond of infantile conspiracist
.theories. as Raimondo, and . again like his mentor . likes to spread
anti-Jewish libels. Both Raimondo and Cole have a habit of responding to
any documentation of their lies by shrieks and slanders and with threats.

Cole never quite gets around to addressing the main criticism against him
that appeared in my FPM article, namely that his theory that .terrorism is
caused by occupation. is without empirical foundation. In his column, he
simply repeats his "theory" that occupation produces terrorism, whereas in
fact the reverse is more commonly the case.

If the Cole Doctrine were true, why did the illegal Chinese occupation of
Tibet not produce terrorism? . that was one of the many questions I asked
in my column attacking Cole.s .theory.! Cole responds on his web page:
because "the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized," adding, "the
Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959 to be a
terrorist action." Actually a handful of Kampas struggled against the
Maoist colonialists, starting in 1951. Leave it up to a
socially-mobilized apologist for Maoism like Cole to denounce these Kampa
rebels, who never targeted civilians, as terrorists, while the Hizbollah
and the Hamas . real terrorist organizations that embrace Osama.s jihad .
these are legitimate anti-occupation protest movements in Juan Cole.s
eyes.

Cole then adds: "The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize
Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until you
first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world." Cole is not
too far off this time. Human rights are a hundred times better respected
and protected in Israel than in the next-best Middle East countries and
better than in close to 188 others. Someone who harps constantly on
supposed human rights abuses by Israel . which is a way to demonize and
delegitimize Israel, a country under threat of annihilation from the Arab
dictatorships Cole supports - while ignoring human rights in other
countries is acting in behalf of malevolent political agendas.

It is exactly like those who shrieked in the late 1930s about human rights
abuses of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, while ignoring the fact the
human rights record of Czechoslovakia was far better than in the countries
seeking to delegitimize and destroy it. Professor Cole resents anyone
questioning his real motives. Does he really imagine that his bluster
against the .Zionist Right. will hide his attempts to promote the agendas
of the anti-Semitic Left?

Cole takes sanctimonious exception to the fact that I referred to the
Sudanese murdering people in southern Sudan as "Arabs" and noted that
those being massacred in Sudan are black Africans. The ruling classes in
Sudan consist of people who speak Arabic, are Moslems, run a program of
coerced "Arabization" in the country, and Sudan is a member of the Arab
League. Their victims are black Africans, even if much of the Sudanese
murdering class is also black.

After raising the Sudan race issue, which was never mentioned at all in
the Frontpage piece criticizing him, Cole insists that this proves that
"The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict." We wonder
how many people are capable of reading Cole's web site without the
constant need to shout "Huh??!!" By the way, lots of Israeli Jews are
black also. What does that make them, Professor Cole, well - besides
right-wing Zionists?

Standing back to view the man whom the leftwing Middle Eastern experts on
America.s college campuses have made the quarterback of their
anti-American game plan, here is Cole.s view of bin Laden and 9-11 and the
war on terror, taken from Raimondo.s site, where Cole has published many
articles:

"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl
Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that
they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian
petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States
out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia
would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron.
Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and
American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the
Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on
to invade Iraq for no good reason."

He then adds:

"Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying
to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands,
humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this
charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with
the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to
validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the
war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range
of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S.
has of its."

In sum, the more Cole complains about those who criticize his extremist
political agenda, his undeniable bias, and his general absence of
scholarship, the more he proves how correct in fact they are.

(For links and references, open
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17520)

2. The Knesset rejected the proposal to hold a national referendum by
about 2
to 1 in a vote last night. The pseudo-religious party SHAS joined the
commmunists, the Arab fascists, Tommy Lapid, and the Labor Party in voting
against the proposal. Among Likud MK's, the vote was in FAVOR of the
referendum by about the same 2 to 1, suggesting that the Likud house is
divided against itself and cannot limp on much longer.

4. The Knesset was even more of a circus this week than it usually is,
and in
the center ring was Tommy Lapid, chief Klansman from Shinui, denouncing
Zahave Gal-On as a prostitute.
(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/557960.html)

Lapid has made a career out of anti-Orthodox bigotry, which did not stop
the prostitutes from the SHAS "religious" party voting last night together
with Lapid against holding a national referendum.

Tommy Lapid almost dropped his burning Magen David when Gal-on compared
Lapid himself to the SHAS "religious" party which Lapid so despises:
Gal-On said that there was no difference between Shinui and the
ultra-Orthodox parties, and that it was "all a question of price."

Gal-On and her own Meretz party of quasi-commies (a term that rhymes with
kamikazes by the way) have always cheered on Lapid's vile and vulgar
attacks on Judaism and on the Orthodox. Last night, Gal-on's chickens
came home to
roost, as she herself became the target of the chief Klansman's tongue.
She responded, "He is pathetic. He is freaked out. Behind
the so-called liberal exterior there is a sexist, chauvinist and racist
person."

5. Pack your bags, America!
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1111980180248

6. Defying the PC Stormtroopers over the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1111980178549&p=1006953079865

7. Pass this on to an Israeli student you know. The contest is open to
Israeli students. Win $500 by ratting out a tenured traitor!
The Churchill Twin Sweepstakes!
By FrontPage Magazine
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 28, 2005

Have you had to endure anti-American propaganda in place of a college
lecture? Now you can turn your professor's left-wing pontificating into
cold, hard cash!

Just submit an essay, in 500 words or less, describing the professor you
have had who most resembles Ward Churchill. This professor could have
called capitalists "little Eichmanns," like Churchill himself. He could
have demonized perfidious, bloodthirsty Jews in Israel, like Juan Cole. He
could have prayed for Americans to lose the war in Iraq, like Nicholas
DeGenova or Robert Jensen. The professor could even have held an
alternative religion exorcism to cleanse the campus of the demons of
conservatism, like Oneida Meranto (a major fan of Che Guevara, who
eliminated his enemies in another manner). Or she could have spent hours
of class time prattling about off-topic political issues, then force
students to say Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction on a
midterm, like UNC-Chapel Hill's own Anthropology 10 professor Alison
Greene.

Whoever the nominee, please indicate the subject of the course and explain
why you have chosen this individual and why he or she deserves the coveted
FrontPage Magazine Churchill Twin Award.

E-mail your submissions to: Ben@CSPC.org. The winner will receive $500.
(It's the capitalist way!) The winning essay and honorable mentions will
also be posted on FrontPageMag.com. Get your essays in now! The deadline
to win is April 23, 2005.

This is NOT a satire! All submissions become property of FrontPageMag.com.
All decisions are final. Many academically abused students will enter; few
victims will win.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17501

8. Who is "Israel Shamir"?
http://list.haifa.ac.il/pipermail/alef/2005-March/007450.html

9. Sharansky on the Jenin Big Lie:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17513

10. Defending Summers at Harvard:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17507

Posted 3/28/2005 01:29:00 PM

1. Old Juan Cole Resorts to Lies and McCarthyism

Old Juan Cole is a lying McCarthyist old soul, and a pathetic
pseudo-academic old soul is he.

Cole has now responding on his own web page to the in-depth expose of his
bias run on Frontpage Magazine recently. In that article, Cole.s long
history of distortion, ignorance, and bias was carefully documented.

Cole seems unable to defend his record from the criticism and exposure
contained in that piece. On his own web page, he complains that he was a
.victim. of .GoogleSmear. by me and by Frontpage Magazine. Cole loves to
whine that he is being .smeared. whenever anyone exposes his errors and
bias, and has a long history of himself smearing Daniel Pipes and Martin
Kramer, who . unlike Cole . are both careful and serious Middle East
scholars.

Cole, in his attempt to defend his evidently indefensible record, defines
GoogleSmear as: .The GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that
make the individual sound like an idiot.. Frankly, we do not think
anyone needs Google to assist in making Cole sound like an idiot. Cole is
so anti-American and biased that Noam Chomsky has said, .Juan Cole is a
very serious and knowledgeable analyst.. Need we say more?

Our proof? Well, no sooner does Cole complain about .dubious facts. in
the Frontpage piece about him and about his being a victim of GoogleSmear
when he himself decides to illustrate GoogleSmear for his readers by
performing it. Cole is not only a practitioner of the same GoogleSmear
about which he complains, but he is a pseudo-academic McCarthyist to boot.

Cole.s defense is to repeat a lie invented earlier this week by his
intimate crony and editor, Dennis .Justin. Raimondo. Cole clearly regards
Raimondo as a legitimate source of information, while complaining that his
critics rely on dubious sources.

One is known by the company that one keeps and Cole keeps intimate company
with Dennis Injustin Raimondo, who has fabricated a neonazi anti-Semitic
conspiracy theory about how Jews supposedly knocked down the World Trade
Center to make poor bin Laden look bad, self-publishing it as a .book..
Cole obviously has no problems with being associated with a semi-literate
neofascist crackpot like Raimondo. Cole not only cites Raimondo.s lunatic
ravings as .authoritative,. but also has published dozens of his own
political commentaries on Raimondo.s seditious pro-terror .antiwar. web
site. And Raimondo.s is not the ONLY anti-American web site on which Cole
publishes his articles, by the way.

Cole defends himself and attacks the Frontpage expose of his .scholarship.
by citing Raimondo.s baseless claim that I am a .Kahanist., that is a
follower of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who set up the Jewish Defense
League. (Raimondo thinks that anyone who claims that Raimondo.s own
anti-Jewish ravings make him an anti-Semite must in fact be a .Kahanist..)

Raimondo.s .evidence. of all this, accepted as scholarly verification by
.Professor. Cole, is that Raimondo googled my name and the word .Kahanist.
and discovered two articles of mine in which I used the word .Kahanist.,
in neither of which did I express any support for the Kahanists or
Kahansism. I repeat, this is the same Juan Cole who whines that HE is a
victim of .GoogleSmear.!!

Now as it turns out, I am not and have never been a Kahanist; indeed I
have criticized Kahane and his organization for over 30 years, and have
been attacked and threatened by the Kahane movement on more than one
occasion. But Juan Cole is simply a leftist anti-American McCarthyist,
tossing out labels baselessly as part of his attempt to smear his own
critics. We pity his students at U-Michigan. We would respond that the
evidence that Cole is a member of al-Qaeda is far, far stronger than any
.evidence. that I have ever had any connection with .Kahanism,. but that
would mean sinking to the gutter level of Cole himself.

Cole is as fond of infantile conspiracist .theories. as Denny Raimondo,
and . again like Raimondo . likes to spread anti-Jewish blood libels.
Both Raimondo and Cole respond to any documentation of their lies by
shrieks and slanders and with threats.

Here is the Cole take on bin Laden and 9-11, taken from Raimondo.s
pro-al-Qaeda "antiwar.com" web site:
"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl
Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that
they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian
petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States
out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia
would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron.
Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and
American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the
Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on
to invade Iraq for no good reason."
He then adds:
"Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying
to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands,
humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this
charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with
the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to
validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the
war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range
of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S.
has of its."
Cole.s closest collaborator Raimondo, in his turn, is godmother of a grand
conspiracy theory about how dem Joos supposedly knocked down the World
Trade Center, all based upon a sock. Yes, a sock. It seems that a
Scottish conspiracist newpaper reported that some Israelis were arrested
(and later cleared and released) in New Jersey on September 11, 2001, and
that one of them had some cash in a sock. Raimondo then took the alleged
cash-in-sock story and erected an entire neonazi .theory. of a Jewish
cabal. None of that seems to bother the learned professor Cole, who
dismisses all Jews who criticize him as .Kahansists., yet refuses to
renounce the neonazi .theory. of his close associate and editor Raimondo.

Now the time has come for all serious scholars to help our the
Cole-Raimondo team in doing research and in developing their conspiracist
theories. I suggest that everyone mail a sock to Prof. Juan at

Professor Juan R. I. Cole
Professor of History
1029 Tisch Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
Voice: (734) 764-6305, 763-1599
FAX (734) 747-4811
Email jercole@umich.edu

And another to Denny Raimondo at
Antiwar.com
1017 El Camino Real #306
Redwood City, CA 94063
408-733-4350
editor@antiwar.com
Ok, I guess cyber-socks count.
Hell, these guys have based their entire careers upon their frustration at
getting coals in their stockings, so send them some new documentation of a
grand conspiracy in the sock you mail them. Help them build their
journalistic credentials!!
Yes, let.s SOCK it to em!

2. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17450
Foreign Exchange Program for Terror
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 25, 2005

College exchange students often visit other countries to learn of other
cultures, appreciate the past, or gain valuable insight into other
regions. Few go to be indoctrinated consciously for the purposes of
political -- and literal -- warfare. However, the International Solidarity
Movement and the Bethlehem Bible College have put together a program that
does just that.

The ISM has long sent American students to the Middle East, where they
undergo training by the ISM-ally, the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, a known terrorist group, and then physically obstruct Israeli
forces trying to nab Palestinian terrorists. Front Page Magazine.s
exposure of the ISM and the much-publicized deaths of two ISM-affiliated
students, American Rachel Corrie and Englishman Tom Hurndall, led to
dwindling recruitment numbers. Heightened scrutiny of terrorist
organizations as well as a recent Israeli crackdown on ISM leaders like
Kate Raphael has forced George Rishmawi, a Canadian-Palestinian Communist
who co-founded the ISM, to rethink his organization.s tactics. Now the
radical group has hit upon using international student exchanges in its
campaign to aid the cause of Palestinian genocidal terror.

Mindful of the setbacks suffered by his activist troops, Rishmawi has set
about remaking the ISM. For starters, he has rechristened the ISM the
Palestine Summer Encounter (PSE). PSE has even managed to find a shill at
Bethlehem Bible College in the West Bank to offer U.S. academic credit in
Arabic. That will make the .educational. program of value to Middle East
study centers across the U.S., many of which have been turned into de
facto lobbying and propaganda bases calling for the dismantling of Israel.
Incidently, generous Saudi and PLO grants are funding these programs.

The PSE.s program will be financed by the Holy Land Trust, a
California-based NGO. Already the Holy Land Trust has caused headaches for
U.S. counterterrorism officials by funding Palestinian NGOs that refuse to
guarantee that the U.S. Agency for International Development funds they
receive won.t be used to bankroll terrorism. The trust is run by Executive
Director Sami Awad, who formerly headed the Palestine Children.s Welfare
Relief Fund, an outfit that routinely featured photos and praise of
suicide bombers on its website. According to Arab-American Christian
journalist Joseph Farah, editor of World Net Daily: .The lies this group
tells in the name of Christianity are big and bold. They include the
standard lines about Jews robbing the homes of Arabs, stealing their land
and brutalizing them in a repressive state of military occupation. These
so-called Christians even rationalize terrorism.. A further look at Holy
Land Trust.s website shows it is clearly political and designed to
demonize .occupier. Israel.

But if the background of the Holy Land Trust is alarming, the program it
is intended to underwrite is even more so. An article on the PSE program
that appeared in the leftist Israeli newspaper Haaretz states, .The PSE
program includes an Arabic course at the Bethlehem Bible College, with
credits going toward a U.S. college degree; volunteer work with
Palestinian aid organizations as well as Israeli peace groups; and trips,
mostly in the West Bank, but also within the Green Line [along Israel.s
border]. The students are hosted by Palestinian families which lowers the
price for participants; the hosts also receive some payment..

In order for students to attend Bethlehem Bible College.s anti-Israel
indoctrination courses for credit, they must be enrolled in schools that
have granted accreditation. Yet one can be certain that students studying
Arabic at this college will also be advancing the ISM.s ultimate political
goal: the destruction of Israel. The Haaretz article explains that
.regardless of background, after a summer in the Palestinian territories,
participants come away with a clear political picture..

The article notes that, previously, participants were reluctant to sign up
for the program. .Nearly all say they shied away from visiting the area
till now because of the cost and that one PSE attraction was its
reasonable price,. the article explains. The .reasonable price. has to do
with subsidies paid by the PLO to import their radical cheerleaders.

As for said importation, as Front Page has revealed, ISM formerly
transported most of its volunteers over to the Holy Land free of charge by
abusing a Birthright Israel program. This program was set up by wealthy
Jewish philanthropists to encourage immigration to Israel and appreciation
for the Jewish state. Rather than supporting this mission, however, the
ISM.s volunteers focused their energies on denouncing Israel as an
.apartheid state. while excusing terrorism and violence against Israelis
as .legitimate resistance.. As a consequence of such revelations,
Birthright Israel applicants have come under greater scrutiny. Funds for
the ISM.s free rides have consequently dried up. In Bethlehem Bible
College, the ISM seems to have discovered a new way for an even wider
group to gain entrance into Israel while cheering its destruction. Indeed,
the program is in some ways even more convenient than Birthright Israel.
Whereas the Birthright program could only be used for free transportation
by anarchists and communists of Jewish ancestry, the Bethlehem College is
far more inclusive: any student radical who favors Israel.s demise is
welcome.

So what exactly is the Bethlehem Bible College? According to the ISM
website, .Bethlehem Bible College seeks to train and prepare Christian
servants.leaders for the churches and society within an Arab context.. As
to what is meant by .Arab context,. a clue comes from the views of
Bethlehem Bible College President Bishara Awad. Although thousands of
Christians have fled the Holy Land in recent decades due to Muslim
persecution, Awad blames the Jewish State for their departure. .Israeli
persecution is .first and foremost. to blame for Christian (and Muslim)
emigration,. he claims.

Indeed, according to Awad, Israel is the greatest force for religious
oppression in the Middle East. He has claimed: .We, Muslims and Christians
alike, have been on the receiving end of oppression since 1967. The
occupation is the root cause of economic deterioration. Some people can.t
live under constant pressure for a long time; so they emigrate when they
are no longer able or willing to withstand oppression..

Asked to comment on Israeli allegations that many Christians leave the
Middle East as a result of harassment by Muslims, Awad flatly denies the
charge. .This is not true,. he says. .I have not seen any attack on our
churches or institutions. We are like brothers here. We share in and
attend each other.s social occasions. We are one people..

Awad.s revisionism would come as significant news to anyone who witnessed
the takeover of the Church of the Nativity by Arafat.s thugs in 2002. In
addition, Muslim desecration of non-Islamic shrines, both Jewish and
Christian, is well documented. Indeed, Christians are considered dhimmis,
or second-class citizens, in Islamic society, and as such are subject to
Muslim whim. Christian businessmen and shops are frequently shaken down by
PLO members in protection rackets. Small wonder, then, that the Christian
population in Bethlehem has decreased from 80 percent to just five percent
since the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Furthermore, the
state of religious freedom in Israel cannot credibly be compared to the
Palestinian territories. Where Israel boasts a longstanding respect for
religious pluralism, the Palestinian territories, in accord with Article 7
of the Palestinian Authority Constitution, are subject to Shari'a or
Islamic law.

That Awad is willing to ignore the troubling record of Islamic attitudes
toward Christianity in order to vilify Israel says much about the
educational environment at Bethlehem College. Indeed, it seems safe to
conclude that through its support of ISM, the college is less likely to
teach Christian reconciliation than to try to convince Christians overseas
to support Islamic hegemony over the Holy Land. It certainly has
considerable resources to do so: according to its website, the college
boasts millions in its budget.

Additional proof that the PSE program is intended to serve as a
recruitment arm for the anti-Israel cause comes from the fact that it
offers students housing with a Palestinian family. In the past, ISM
leaders have stayed in houses where terrorists and suicide bombers had
formerly lived. This makes it probable that PSE students from the U.S. may
actually be living with families implicated in anti-Israel terrorism.
Finally, if the ISM.s history of anti-Israel activism is any indication,
the Palestinian Summer Encounter extracurricular activities will almost
certainly include interfering with the IDF.s anti-terrorist operations.

Despite the PSE.s extremist agenda, it is billed under the
postcard-pleasant mantra: .Come to Palestine, Stay with Friends.. But a
more accurate description of the PSE program would read like this: Come to
a war zone. Learn how to promote Muslim hegemony over the Jews and
Christians. And get college credit, too.

3. Bloggers for Klocek against Depaul University:
http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/

4. The Winner is:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/moonbat-sweepstakes-winner-is.html

Posted 3/27/2005 09:38:00 AM

Dennis the Menace, the Stormtrooper-Wannabe
Dennis ?Justin? Raimondo is no doubt the very best illustration of the merging today between leftwing extremism and neonazism. Raimondo is one of th emost notorious leftwing nazis in America. He is editor of the far-left ?Antiwar.com? web site which combines support for Islamic terrorism with open anti-Semitism. IT features, among its regulat columnists, Juan Cole, anti-Israel professor of Middle East studies at the University of Michigan, and Ran HaCohen, anti-Israel pro-Hizbollah ?researcher? from Tel Aviv University. Raimondo himself is probably best known for fabricating a Chamish-like ?theory? about how Israel was really behind the 91?attack on New York, a theory that has long been a staple on neonazi crackpot web pages. Raimondo?s evidence? Well, on the same day, 9-11, the FBI arrested four (Raimondo says five) Israelis they thought looked ?suspicious?. The Israelis were working on a moving van. Anyone from NY can tell you that almost all th emoving
van companies in the city are operated by ex-Israelis, many of them in the US illegally. Raimondo decided that the van workers, guilty perhaps of not proper immigration visas, were in fact the tip of an Israeli conspiracy to topple the World Trade Center and have the poor innocent al-Qaeda take the blame. Raimondo?s ?evidence?? Well, the Israelis had ?multiple passports?, which I guess means two. Lots of people in the US and in Israel hav emore than one passport. One Israeli also had over $4000 hidden in a sock. Which in fact is evidence more of the Israeli being stupid (or not having papers to open a legal bank account). Raimondo built all this up into a grand crackpot conspiracy ?theory? and even got it published (http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595296823/qid=1111908109/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/702-7555842-5247241), apparently self-published. SO who exactly is this clown?
Frontpage Magazine recently "outed" neofascist DENNIS "JUSTIN" RAIMONDO, operator of the seditious and fanatically anti-American Antiwar.com blog. But FPM is not the only outfit that believes that Dennis "Justin" Raimondo's politics might just stem back to his frustration over his inability to become a scout leader in the Hitlerjugend.

The National Director of the Anti-Defamation League has also denounced Dennis the Menace as a vicious anti-Semite promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy "theories." Stephen Schwartz called him a "notorious Saddamizer and admirer of Axis seditionists." Ben Johnson has noted Raimondo's role in the axis of evil that joins antiiwar protesters and neonazis.

Raimondo has repeated and spread lies invented by neonazis suggesting that Jews had something to do with the 9-11 attacks. Steven Schwartz wrote:

"This was the individual who, almost single-handedly, conflated a mass of disconnected rumors into the theory that Israel stood behind the atrocities of that terrible day. Since then, this Dennis-the-wannabe-Menace has remained best known for selling that product, while traveling back and forth across a no-man?s-land of neofascist bizarrerie. He also has enjoyed a brief notoriety as an inciter to mutiny in the armed forces, warning that American soldiers should not ?die for Israel .? ...Dennis Raimondo is not an intellectual, or a journalist, or even much of a writer.... Dennis Raimondo has refined political and moral inconsistency, if not pure hypocrisy, to a level that is almost unique."

Elsewhere Schwartz adds:

"What is the difference between Dennis "Justin" Raimondo, who publicly encouraged U.S. service personnel to desert, not long before the Iraq operation began, and his ally, Kevin "Keith Sorel" Keating, who carried a banner in the streets calling on the same troops to `shoot their officers?' In practical terms, nothing."

The semi-literate Raimondo compares the super-scholar Daniel Pipes to David Duke because Pipes does not endorse Raimondo's support for Islamist fascism. It is precisely because of that support that Alexander Cockburn praises neofascist Raimondo. Interestingly, Raimondo seems to hate not only Americans and Jews but even Ukrainians. What would he make of a Jewish American whose grandparents came from the Ukraine?

One thing that has us puzzled is why Raimondo considers it insulting to be compared to David Duke. After all, we can think of no one who so resembles David Duke more than Dennis himself, and if the white sheet fits then he should wear it. Raimondo is a cross between David Duke and Elmer Fudd. No wonder Juan Cole wants to be a regular official contributor to the Raimondo web site!

More than one writer has represented Dennis Raimondo (who has written a column for Russia's Pravda for years) as an enemy agent, seeking to harm the United States.
(To find links and references for above, open http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/dennis-menace-as-stormtrooper-wannabe.html)

If you have been following the crackpot press these past couple of years,
and by that I mean the assorted neo-Nazi web sites, white supremacy
magazines, and the ?anarchist? and anti-globalization ?alternative? commie
press, you will know that they have been filled with nutty conspiracy
theories about how Israelis were somehow involved in 9/11. Dennis the
Menace is the inventor of the "theory".

Naturally, the Islamofascist crowd adopted these ?theories.? Their ?proof? was that a handful of Israelis working as moving men got themselves arrested under what the police at first thought were suspicious circumstances. This, asserted the lobotomy candidates, proved that the Mossad or other Jewish cabals were really behind 9/11 and not those 19 Arabs who actually carried out the atrocities. The standards of proofs and methodologies of evidence behind these ?theories? might have made Barry Chamish proud.

A few months back the four Israelis at the center of the incident decided
to take action to put these scurrilous rumors to rest.

In a statement dated September 14, the Israelis announced they have filed a law suit against the Department of Justice in the United States District Court in New York, alleging that law enforcement officers and officials of the Bureau of Prisons unlawfully incarcerated them for an extended period of time and violated their civil rights during their more than two month imprisonment in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in 2001. The four plaintiffs claim that they were held incommunicado without access to attorneys or family, subjected to rough interrogations, physically assaulted, deprived of sleep and subjected to racists taunting by guards. The law suit seeks millions of dollars in compensation.

The Israelis say they were working for a New Jersey moving company when their truck was stopped by police near the George WashingtonBridge. When it was discovered that they possessed foreign drivers licenses, the nervous officers placed them under arrest as suspects in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They were than handed over to federal agents for weeks of interrogation.

It was this arrest that got the conspiracy theorists in the Arab and Islamic world going, spreading reports that was behind the terrorist atrocities. Islamic and neo-Nazi groups pointed to the arrests of the Israelis as ?proof? that the Mossad and Israel had perpetrated the attack on the World Trade Center. Hate groups around the world posted hundreds of stories centering on the arrests of the Israelis and their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks.

Eventually, the US Department of Justice came out of the closet and put an end to all the fruitcake anti-Semitic conspiracy nonsense But the fact that the four were eventually cleared of all suspicions and released did not put the libels to rest, and stories about the Israelis are still regularly appearing on the internet.

American human rights groups have also charged that the Bureau of Prisons violated the civil liberties of those detained by the United States following 9/11. And following an internal investigation the Department of Justice released a report in June, 2003, which, in part, found: ?the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC against some September 11 detainees, particularly during the first months after the attack.?

But perhaps the last word should go to the plaintiffs? Israeli counsel, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, who goes to the heart of the law suit?s greater meaning. According to Leitner: ?The infamous arrest of these young Israelis on 9/11 has been used by anti-Semites worldwide as ?proof? of Israel?s involvement in the World Trade Center attack. Our clients are seeking compensation for the harm they suffered in the MDC by prison officials. In addition, the law suit will serve as an important forum to debunk the lie that Israel or the Mossad was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It will show that there was no Jewish conspiracy as the Arab world continues to claim and put an end to this racist blood libel.?

Antiwar.com and al-Qaeda
(from moonbatcentral.com)
Poor Justin Raimondo. Your correspondent?s humble request that the Antiwar.com chieftain provide a link to his site?s attacks on al-Qaeda, which he assured us do in fact exist, seems to have sent him into something approaching a meltdown. Indeed, the request for evidence has earned yours truly the droll title of ?Commissar Laksin? and the assertion that I?m engaging in libel. Now that?s touchy, even for a libertarian. For all his bluster, however, I?m happy to report that Justin has obliged.

Just one problem: It doesn?t help his case.

In fact, the September 2001 piece starts off on a rather embarrassing note for our paleo-propagandist, as he confidently predicts that the invasion of Afghanistan, so feverishly desired by the hated neo-con quislings, will not happen after all?an assertion that does not, to say the least, recommend Raimondo?s powers of political analysis. But never mind that. Let?s turn to the good stuff, the smash-mouth attacks on our nation?s Islamist enemies. Yes, well, you see, the trouble is? those don?t exist. Instead, Raimondo makes Bin Laden?s case for him, rehearsing the litany of supposed terrorist grievances and calling it analysis. Thus:

"To point out that it is a mistake to garrison thousands of American soldiers on the Saudi peninsula does not justify the destruction of the World Trade Center: it only helps us to understand why it happened. To hold that it does not serve American interests to unconditionally support Israel hardly justifies terrorism. To say that the continual bombing of Iraq is a war crime is not to engage in `moral equivalence' ? it is to state a fact glaringly obvious to the Arab `street' and Muslims all over the world. To point to the sources and inspiration of bin Laden's movement is not to prettify it but to analyze it: for only by such sober analysis will it be possible to rip up the terrorist network by its roots. Those roots are ideological, in the conviction that the American and British `crusaders' are out to destroy Islamic civilization?"

Elsewhere, Raimondo avers:

"The massive intelligence failure that made September 11 possible can be fixed ? some seem to think ? by throwing money at the problem and a quick change of personnel. But the real failure, here, is of our interventionist foreign policy. (emphasis mine)"

If you?re thinking that this sounds less like a rhetorical broadside against al-Qaeda and more like threadbare isolationist boilerplate, you?re in possession of an I.Q. at least twice the mean of Antiwar.com. Which, I regret to say, is not a noteworthy achievement.

A few final points: Raimondo takes issue with my calling Michael Scheuer a ?disgraced? CIA agent: ?Scheuer is ?disgraced? because ? well, he got a bad review in Commentary.? Um, no, Justin, Scheuer is disgraced because he has gone from authoring intelligence reports on matters of pressing national security, however incompetently he did so, to filing crude Israel-bashing polemics for Antiwar.com, where they go to die a slow, unread death.

One can understand Raimondo?s sympathy for Scheuer as he seems to share the shamed spook's belief that Israel is a ?theocracy-in-all-but-name.? Justin writes, ?And we aren?t supposed to ask why a nation that isn?t a theocracy wants to be known as ?the Jewish state.??

First, it never fails to amaze me how the margins of the Left and Right gravel about their inability to say certain things even as they?re saying them. If Raimondo were more honest, he would say what?s really bugging him: namely, that no one?s listening. No doubt that hurts, old sport. But, as the late Hubert Humphrey used to say, the right to freedom of speech does not imply the right to be taken seriously.

The second point seems too blindingly obvious to make, but this is Antiwar.com so we must take nothing for granted. The fact that Israel is a largely Jewish state does not make it a ?theocracy? any more than Europe?s Christian heritage makes that continent a theocracy or the Judeo-Christian ethic at the heart of American culture makes our country a theocracy. A theocracy would be a country like, say, Iran. You know Iran, Justin. That?s the country your coherency-challenged contributors are so assiduously shilling for.
Posted by Jacob Laksin

Justin Raimondo: An American Neo-Fascist
By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2005

Dennis ?Justin? Raimondo is a minor celebrity in the U.S., thanks to a 10-year career as an amateur demagogue in the libertarian milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area, a political environment where anything goes and nothing matters. He has the familiar personality traits of the type: ?sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance combined with gaudy erudition.? He poses as a conservative but maintains a website at antiwar.com, that features anti-American cranks like Noam Chomsky and is hugely popular with the left ? not surprisingly since it views America as an incipient fascist state.

Raimondo is a confused and confusing person, who seeks to be the master of the confusion he creates. Born plain Dennis, he renamed himself Justin, while attending the Cherry Lawn School, a defunct prep school in Darien, Conn., which he graduated in 1970.

Raimondo unquestionably encompasses many contradictions. Now past 50, he features a photo of himself on his website with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, in a fey (and failed) pose as an homme fatale. He is flamboyantly gay, but promotes himself as a Buchananite conservative and was in fact Buchanan?s San Francisco campaign spokesman during the ?culture war? that other gays took personally, many elections ago. The entire package is deceitful, and it is a calculated deceit.

The movement that Raimondo has cobbled out of opponents of the Iraq war, who are drawn into his site, is unabashedly fascist. Justin Raimondo personifies an American ?red-brown? alliance, like the one that surfaced briefly in the 1930s when Communists and Nazis combined forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. This alliance was revived after the fall of Russian Communism, when Stalinists and fascists around the world united on an old platform ? war against the Jews ? of which more will be said further on.

Raimondo?s own understanding of fascism ? a word he himself throws carelessly around when defaming political enemies and disarming potential critics -- is utterly superficial. In a preposterous column titled ?A Fascist America,? (March 3, 2005), he defines fascism as follows:

1) ?The idealization of the State as the embodiment of an all-powerful national will or spirit;

2) ?The leader principle, which personifies the national will in the holder of a political office (whether democratically elected or otherwise is largely a matter of style);

3) ?The doctrine of militarism, which bases an entire legal and economic system on war and preparations for war.?

Of course. applied to America this is absurd. Outside the neo-Nazi fringe, no Americans, least of all Republicans, idealize the state. The ?leader principle? is not only not in evidence, it is almost absent in a political season when the President has been attacked more viciously than any chief executive in memory; and it is pretty difficult to refer to American ?militarism? when the country?s security rests on a military that is voluntary and under attack. In the same column, while attempting to draw a parallel between opponents of the anti-war crowd and fascists, Raimondo even lends credibility to Hitler?s fairy tale that the Nazi seizure of power was a response to ?the imminent danger of Communist revolution? ? a particularly absurd assertion since the Communists actively colluded with the Nazis in their attacks on Weimar?s democracy and passively supported Hitler?s accession to power.

In an attempt to smear America even further (as if that would be possible) Raimondo throws in Augusto Pinochet, the left?s favourite example of an American puppet. But Pinochet never idealized the Chilean state, or promoted a cult of himself as a leader, or prepared for war or waged war against any foreign country, as required by Raimondo?s fascist model. Pinochet even organized a democratic referendum that removed him from power. Indeed, Pinochet was no more than a typical, short-term military dictator of a type seen all over Latin America, bereft of charisma or serious ideology. His rise to power was the consequence of historical accidents, not of ideology or mass mobilization, and he left behind a thriving democracy.

Raimondo himself, on the other hand, has much in common with the true historical type. He once sought notoriety as a leftist, but now poses as a rightist, a pattern first set by Mussolini in 1915. Years ago Raimondo attempted to become a Republican leader in San Francisco but was quickly dumped after boring the small party group in that city with his pretensions and diatribes. He took over a new conservative tabloid in San Francisco and soon put it out of business by turning every front page into a showcase for headlines about himself.

He has always wanted to be considered an author and journalist, no less than a political figure. At about 13 or so, he seems to have imagined himself as a science fictioneer. But he never had the discipline or stamina to apply himself to any profession aside from that of absurdist publicity hound. He has failed as a journalist and political commentator, exactly as Hitler failed as a painter, as Mussolini failed as a socialist leader, and as the most notorious fascist of the left, Fidel Castro, failed as a lawyer.

Like his models, when Raimondo never engages intellectually with opponents, but relies on invective, insults, and innuendo. Notwithstanding his bizarre and vulnerable persona as a gay Buchananite, he glories in violating the privacy of others. He is obsessed with exposing neoconservatives as ?Trotskyites,? a largely spurious claim, since the most famous example among the original neoconservatives, Irving Kristol, was a Trotskyist for only a year, nearly seventy years ago, and only a handful of recent ex-leftists ? almost entirely ex-Democrats ? are leading neo-conservatives today.

The psychological term for Raimondo?s posturing is ?projection.? He is obsessed with rooting out alleged political, ideological, and even religious chameleons, with the unconscious intent of advertising his own political transvestism. This pattern is evident in all his activities: he claims that America is becoming a dictatorship, the better to justify his own ambitions for power. He defends the establishment media against criticism by conservative weblog authors, although without the rise of the ?blogs? he would be nothing. Until the launch of Buchanan?s unreadable (and soon to be defunct) American Conservative, his only place of publication was the paleo-conservative Chronicles.

Posing as a war-hater, Raimondo defends murderous dictators like Milosevic, who unleashed the only wars in Europe over the past half century. He presents the Ba?athist party-states in Iraq and Syria as victims of the malicious West and openly wished that Japan had won the Second World War, while fiercely alleging his patriotic motivations. When it comes to America?s present wars, he revels in a repellent defeatism. The heinous attacks on America on 9/11 become for him an explanation of American ?fascism.?

Taking a leaf from his comic-book canon of political wisdom, Raimondo describes fascism as a product of ?the traumatic humbling of a power once considered mighty.? He cites Germany defeated in the First World War, while ignoring that Italy, where fascism originated, was a victor in that war, as was the third Axis power, Japan. Perhaps this omission can be ascribed to the fact that Raimondo idolizes Japan, which was at the height of its power when it attacked Pearl Harbor. As he wrote so eloquently, in an article titled. ?Hiroshima Mon Amour: Why Americans Are Barbarians,? posted to his site on August 8, 2001, ?the idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled.? By contrast, imperialist Japan, which slaughtered millions in East Asia, is his idea of paradise. He believes ?the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.? It is, by the way, extremely doubtful that Raimondo has ever set foot on Japanese soil.

The upshot of Raimondo?s mishmash is his charge that September 11 was ?an enormous defeat for the U.S.,? and thus the source of Bush fascism. Many fascist movements have been expansionist and imperialist, but others were historically known for their promotion of disaffection and demoralization, such as those in France and England before the Second World War, and the isolationist legion in America at the same time, which Raimondo seeks to revive. The Rosetta Stone of his philosophy is Buchanan?s idea of the betrayed ?American republic? ? betrayed by democracy that is ? an ahistorical trope which echoes prior fascist movements.

Classic fascism has other characteristics that resonate in Raimondo?s agendas. He is a fanatical rumormonger, asserting that U.S. war plans against Syria and Iran are nearly operational, while Bush administration policies toward these states have been notably circumspect. He was among the most active disseminators of the legend that an innocuous document, titled ?A Clean Break,? having to do with Israeli foreign policy, was actually a blueprint for the invasion of Iraq.

If, as Mary McCarthy said, every word written by the Stalinist Lillian Hellman was a lie, including ?and? and ?the,? Raimondo is a prevaricator down to the placement of commas, periods, and semicolons. One of his favorite tricks is the mendacious use of hyperlinks, giving the impression that his statements are backed by other sources. These are usually his own articles, immodestly declared by him to be ?classics,? which in fact have little or nothing to do with his latest ravings, but lead to more lies through more links. This, too, is not original with Raimondo; it is the Chomsky method of meretricious citations.

Raimondo calls Abraham Lincoln ?the closest to a dictator that any American president has ever come.? A couple of days later, forgetting or ignoring that statement, he labels President Franklin Roosevelt the ?predecessor? of today?s ?fascism,? and declares that Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were also ?fascist heroes.? At the same time, he tenaciously defends Milosevic ? a dictator who freed no slaves ? and, equally insistently, denies the occurrence of the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. He also defames the Albanians, and encourages others on his site to do the same, and then denies being an apologist for Serbian war crimes. He has called the Kosovars ?the Shi?ites of Western Europe? ? meaning, Muslim friends of America, who deserve to be slaughtered. He fervently hopes for a new war between Slavic Macedonians and Albanians, since nothing warms his heart so much as the thought of dead Albanians except, perhaps, the dead ?Zionists? buried in the Twin
Towers
on 9/11.

Calumny is Raimondo?s Socratic method. He refers to David Frum and Richard Perle, two intellectuals who have no governmental authority whatever, as ?strutting martinets.? When I myself attempted to clarify the status of Islam in Uzbekistan, an American ally, while criticizing obstacles to democracy there, he labeled me a defender of torture. He accused me of ?rationalizing the same sort of regime in the U.S.? as in Uzbekistan ? based, according to him, on ?torturing dissidents, shutting out all political opposition, and arresting thousands on account of their political and religious convictions.?

In his latest ridiculous column, ?The Specter of Fascism,? dated March 9, the Raimondian style of revisionist history is in full display. In a single paragraph, he refers to the leftist New York tabloid PM, published in the late 1930s and 1940s, as ?Communist Party-controlled,? which will certainly come as a surprise to Arnold Beichman, a long-serving anti-Communist and former leading editor of the paper. PM was famous as a battleground where Stalinists and anti-Stalinists fought for influence, but was never under Communist control. For one thing, unlike the real Communist press, such as the Daily Worker, PM did not promote an ?antiwar? alliance, during the Stalin-Hitler pact, with the Nazis, of the kind Raimondo wishes to revive today ? which is why PM, a newspaper that went out of business in 1948, still provokes Raimondista rage. Raimondo refers to PM?s identification of pre-1941 isolationists as a ?fifth column,? which Dennis shrieks was ?scurrilous and untrue.? He
?s
wrong. Calling the pro-Axis rabble in America then a ?fifth column? was accurate reporting, just as it is accurate reporting to describe Dennis Raimondo as a sympathizer of America?s enemies now.

Sometimes Raimondo posts other leftwing fascists to do his slandering for him. He has done this with Kevin Keating, infamous for hoisting a banner during the anti-Iraq demonstrations in San Francisco that read: ?We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.? If a critic of Saudi Arabia?s support for Wahhabism enters his sights, he will accuse them of fomenting war against the Kingdom. He has, in fact, insisted that the neo-conservatives in the government are actually preparing military action against the Saudis. Raimondo?s protective attitudes towards the Saudis derive perhaps from the fact he and the Saudi princes share a commitment to the fable of ?Zionist? involvement in 9/11.

For Raimondo, the Great Satan is America, and the Little Satan is Israel. He has written a screed called The Terror Enigma, that is a kind of Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the War on Terror. Raimondo?s tract ? it?s only a pamphlet issued by a vanity press ? insinuates, with no serious evidence, that the Israeli government had prior knowledge of 9/11 but failed to warn our authorities; that because an Israeli lived in the same neighborhood as a 9/11 conspirator they were naturally complicit; Israelis selling art on the streets of the U.S. were actually big-time spies engaged in undermining our government; that here, there, and everywhere, the omnipotent Israelis control everything, so why not the attack on the Twin Towers as well? The next step from this conspiracy logic is, of course, the claim that Israel was in on 9/11 with the Bush administration.

On October 29, 2004 Raimondo wrote a piece under the headline, ?Bush and Kerry put Israel first.? It claimed that, ?the Jewish state keeps an entire people captive in the twin concentration camps of Gaza and the West Bank;? and ?the Israelis love to torture and berate [Yasir Arafat] far too much to let him die a natural death.? Referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he wrote, ?one needn?t refer to fiction when the relevant facts are so readily available.? (In other words, the Protocols may be fake, but they tell the truth.) According to Raimondo, ?Today, the word ?fascist? is the political equivalent of the ?f?-word, rendered virtually meaningless on account of its degeneration into pure epithet. Yet, Israel in its present trajectory fits the classic definition of fascism.? And: ?Israel, far from being our faithful ally, is potentially an enemy.?

Almost as intense as his hatred for the Jewish state is Raimondo?s loathing of democracy. Some may have been taken aback by the volume of his bile when he denounced the ?orange revolution? in Ukraine as well as the current democratizing efforts in Lebanon. But not those who have followed Raimondo?s prominent association with the Russian Jew-baiting website, Pravda.ru, and its American contributor, the neo-Nazi Bill White.

Bill White has followed the predictable career of neo-Nazi agitators. He is a Jew-hater and a compulsive liar, frequently inventing ?facts? about those he targets. Posing as a ?libertarian socialist? with a site at www.overthrow.com, he recently distinguished himself by hailing the murder of the family of the judge in Chicago who had the temerity to order payment of a fine by a neo-Nazi leader. The Roanoke Times reported on March 3, ?As authorities investigate the killings of a federal judge?s family in Chicago, a Roanoke white supremacist on Wednesday applauded the murders as justified violence against Jews and the federal government. ?I don?t feel bad that Judge [Joan Humphrey] Lefkow?s family was murdered,? William A. White, editor of The Libertarian Socialist News, wrote in an essay Tuesday on his Web site, Overthrow.com. ?In fact, when I heard the story I laughed. ?Good for them!? was my first thought.??

While sorting out the love affair between antiwar.com and overthrow.com is akin to diving into a sewer, Dennis Raimondo and Bill White were eager contributors to the Pravda.ru site until the ?patriotic? admirers of both bridled at their association with a journalistic enterprise associated, in the mind of most Americans, with old-fashioned Communist propaganda. Articles by both Raimondo and White have been widely recirculated by the Saudi-funded Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In the ?red-brown? logic, Jew-baiting works equally well for fascists, Communists, and Islamo-fascists.

Raimondo?s website consistently published propaganda generated by Randall (Ismail) Royer, a former CAIR employee now doing a 20-year federal sentence for terrorist activities. Recently, one of Royer?s associates, Ahmad Omar Abu Ali, was charged with plotting to assassinate President Bush in collaboration with al-Qaida. Before his arrest, Royer distinguished himself between with a campaign to harass and intimidate critics of the jihadists ? myself, and the Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed among them ? in the Washington region. Raimondo gleefully recycled Royer?s Jew-baiting rants on his website. CAIR, which employed Royer, joined in the campaign by redistributing the Raimondo screeds. CAIR ? which pretends to be an anti-defamation organization ? also disseminates the neo-Nazi propaganda of Bill White.

CAIR poses as a civil liberties advocate, Raimondo poses as ?antiwar,? White poses as a ?libertarian socialist,? and their comrade-in-arms Kevin Keating poses as a ?revolutionary.? The technique is familiar to any history student: the Nazi party called itself the socialist party of the German workers, while plotting to suppress the labor movement and enslave wage-earners.

The law recognizes that some conspiracies are real: one such is the common effort of Raimondo, CAIR, Royer, Abu Ali, White, Keating, and others to silence the critics of Islamist extremism and intimidate the supporters of America?s leadership in the global war on terror. Of that leadership, Raimondo has written, ?Go F*ck Yourself, Mr. President.? (November 26, 2003).

Raimondo has taken on the role of a pre-1941 Axis agent in America, lashing the Jews, giving comfort to the country?s worst enemies, defaming the president, and, in general, seeking to undermine faith in democracy. He also craves martyrdom, and dreams that he will be arrested and tried for sedition the way some of his heroes were. He is so reckless in his provocations that he may some day get his wish. Raimondo is a prophet of disintegration and ruin. Whether he achieves his martyrdom or not, he has certainly earned a minor footnote in the history of ?extraordinary popular delusions.? If, as he claims, a ?specter of fascism? is present in America today, Raimondo can best locate it with a mirror.

Posted 3/25/2005 11:55:00 AM

1. Igor's Struggle:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/lefts-first-amendment-strikes-weizmann.html

2. Further Outting of the ISM Terrorists:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17450

3. CONTRACTS AND COVENANTS: RELIGIOUS AND LEGAL PERSPECTIVES
The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle is very proud to announce the
launch of Bashert: The LGBT Initiative. Bashert seeks to create a fully
welcoming and inclusive Jewish community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) Jews in Greater Seattle. This initiative creates
opportunities for LGBT Jews to be together, celebrate, and explore our
Jewish identities in an affirming environment.

Our launch event will be a panel discussion with religious leaders and a
legal expert. The panel will share their thoughts on the interpretation of
LGBT relationships in both Jewish law and civil law, and offer direction
for continuing to work toward acceptance of all relationships.

Rabbi Will Berkovitz, Assistant Director of Hillel, will moderate a panel
discussion including:
Rabbi Michael A. Latz of Kol HaNeshamah
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, Assistant Rabbi of Herzl-Ner Tamid
Julie Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Law, Seattle University
This is a free event and there will be no solicitation.
Date: Monday, April 18, 2005
Time: 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Location: Hillel at the University of Washington
Schedule:
7:00 p.m. 7:30 p.m. - Kosher dessert reception
7:30 p.m. 9:00 p.m. - Welcome by Rob Spitzer, Immediate Past Board Chair,
Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle
Panel and Q&A

For more information about Bashert or this event, please email
Bashert@jewishinseattle.org.

Any idea why the dessert there will be kosher?

4. Equal time for Nazis?
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/25363/format/html/displaystory.html

Posted 3/24/2005 10:56:00 AM

http://www.geocities.com/barryconspiracy/image1.jpg

(Happy Purim!)

Posted 3/24/2005 10:49:00 AM

1. Don't call it 'racism'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STEVEN PLAUT, THE JERUSALEM POST Mar. 23, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1977 Israel's criminal code was changed. Section 144A made "racism" a
crime. Racism was defined as "persecution, humiliation, demeaning,
displaying animosity, hostility, violence or strife toward a population
group or parts of such a group, all on the basis of skin color or
membership in a racial or ethnic-national grouping."

At first glance, this law seems innocuous enough. After all, who can be in
favor of racism or against attempts to eliminate it?

But the main problems in this law quickly become clear. First, the law
criminalizes some expressions of speech, and so infringes free speech.
Second, the definition of "racism" in the law is so vague as to render the
entire law arbitrary and useless. Third, in its implementation and
enforcement the law has already been used in an arbitrary and
anti-democratic manner for partisan purposes.

The law has become a bludgeon to suppress free speech selectively, used
against some right-wing Israeli Jews. At the same time there has never
been any attempt to prosecute Arabs nor left-wing Jewish extremists under
the same law.

The immediate motivation for the framers of Israel's law was the
activities of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. The law's purpose
was to suppress the freedom of speech of these Kahanists and of some other
fringe groups among Israeli Jews.

But prosecuting Kahanists for "racism" is inconsistent and arbitrary.

Most of the problems with the anti-racism law became clear soon after it
was passed by the Knesset. One of the first cases prosecuted under the law
was the State of Israel v. Rabbi Ido Elba (Docket 2831/95).

Elba had published an article arguing that in the Torah there are separate
rabbinic laws applying to killing Jews, covered in the part of the Ten
Commandments prohibiting "murder," and the killing of Canaanite non-Jews
living among Jews, which was prohibited under a separate law given to all
humans descending from Noah. The article was a scholarly exercise in
explaining rabbinic laws and especially the commentary on manslaughter by
Maimonides.

But the publication came out shortly after the massacre of Arabs in Hebron
by Baruch Goldstein, and the public and some politicians were looking for
a target to prosecute for anti-Arab racism. In April 1995, Elba was
convicted under the anti-racism law and sentenced to four years'
imprisonment (two of them being a suspended sentence). The Supreme Court
upheld the conviction and the sentence the following year.

The vagueness of the anti-racism law is extremely problematic. The law's
language was so poorly formulated and thought through that it would make
statements like "I do not want to date non-Jews," or "I do not like blond
women" crimes. Should reading certain passages in the Bible be prohibited
because they offend some modern ears?

The law explicitly makes advocating discrimination against a demographic
group to be racism. But Israel is full of groups advocating discrimination
against Jews as part of affirmative action preferences, and, of course,
also discrimination against males. Not a single person has ever been
prosecuted in Israel for this. Why not?

Racism is, after all, a belief or a feeling, albeit an evil one, but a
private one. Do we really want a Racism Patrol inspecting bars and poker
games, hunting down individuals making racist statements in chat rooms or
in salons?

The anti-racism law is not merely an assault against free speech, but
arguably the most ludicrous law Israel has on its books. A Kahanist was
indicted and convicted of racism for selling T-shirts printed with the
words "Where there are no Arabs there is no terrorism." Another is under
investigation for selling an anti-disengagement-plan board game.

In contrast, no racism by Arabs has been prosecuted. Nor has bigotry by
politicians such as Shinui's Tommy Lapid, whose entire party agenda is
based on anti-haredi bigotry. When communist Sami Michael, a prominent
writer and a leader of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, made
comments which struck me as justifying Hamas's mass murders of Jews, he
was not prosecuted as a racist. No Arab political parties . regardless of
how outrageous their statements are . have been banned or prosecuted under
the anti-racism law. Neither have Israeli professors, artists or
intellectuals endorsing and justifying Arab terrorism against Jews, or
declaring that Jews are not entitled to any form of self-determination.

Free speech is alive in Israel, but wounded and threatened as the internal
political divisions in Israel deepen. Besides the prosecution of those
utilizing free speech and saying things of which the political
establishment disapproves, there are growing, open threats from the
government to use the police, intelligence services and preventive
detention without trial to bully opponents of government policy into
silence. The very fact that assaults against free speech for "racists" are
so popular in Israel, especially among the chattering classes, illustrates
how shallow, conditional and dubious is the commitment by so many in
Israel to democracy.

The writer is a professor at Haifa University.

This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1111548530213&p=1006953079865

2. Ba'athists on the Run:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/baathists-on-run.html

3. Academic fever swamps:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17459

4. "Human Rights Watch" as an Extremist Group:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17460

5. Financing Treason:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17456

6. More of those awful anti-terror Allied colonial troops:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050323-120717-6197r.htm

7. Indians against Lefties:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17455

8. A Purim from the Past:
http://www.jewishmag.com/11MAG/opinion/opinion.htm

9. Politically Correct Scrollof Esther:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2104

10. Depoliticize the classroom!:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17476

Posted 3/23/2005 11:05:00 AM

Old Juan Cole Is a Very Sad Soul
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 23, 2005

Since November 2004, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole has served as the "Rais" (the Palestinian term for head of state) of the Middle East Studies Association. MESA is far less an academic organization for scholars than it is an anti-America and anti-Israel advocacy group, operating a nonstop jihad against Bush's war against terrorism. A professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History, Cole has been named one of the eight most biased professors in America.

Cole, who led the lobby to clear Saddam of any ties with terrorism, believes that a group of Jewish ?neo-conservatives? largely runs U.S. policy toward the Middle East. His recurrent theory is that a nebulous ?pro-Likud? cabal controls the U.S. government from a small number of key positions in the Executive Branch. Jonathan Calt Harris has declared: "He (Cole) is blindly anti-Israel to the point of being an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, an apologist for radical Islam, and someone who despises American public opinion."

Some of Cole's most outrageous statements include:

?Much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel.? (Actually only Egypt and Jordan have, and the former is observed by Egypt mainly in its non-compliance.)

?Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction.?

?Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up.?

?Supporting orphans is, in any case, not the same as funding terrorism." (Cole is referring to subsidies to the families of suicide bombers by Saddam, the Saudis, and others. Of course there is nothing wrong with the PLO making Jewish children orphans in Old Juan Cole?s eyes.)

Cole has also pushed the Israel divestment campaign by campus anti-Semites, supposedly because Arabs are "mistreated" by Israel. Never mind that Arabs in Israel are treated a thousand times better than are Arabs in Arab countries.

Of course, Cole?s so-called passion for speaking out against human rights abuses in underdeveloped countries is rather one sided. Concerning the atrocities and massacres in Darfur, Cole has blamed it on the U.S. and the U.K., claiming the Iraq War ook attention away from Sudan. Imaginary mistreatment of Arabs by Israel upsets Cole, while mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Christians and Black Muslims by Sudanese Arabs is not worth a Michigan yawn. And Cole has been notably quiet about the 200,000 people massacred in Algeria. Maybe he could not figure away to blame the Jews or the neocons for those. Needless to say, Cole has never called for divestment from Syria until it frees Lebanon, nor from Iran or any other anti-American regime for which tenured extremists feel enlightened affection.

A while back Cole crayoned a piece in which he complained that the media are ignoring America's "historians of Iraq" ? people who "know about the country in its historical context.? He is referring, of course, to the academic members of MESA, who by and large hold the same opinions as Cole. Middle East Scholar Martin Kramer has shown that the dearth of real scholarship on Saddam's Iraq was due to pressure from the pro-Arab MESA professors to treat Saddam with kid gloves. Cole has endorsed conspiracy theories concerning the CIA about which one ordinarily has to go to neonazi web sites like RENSE to read. IraqPundit called Cole "dependably misinformed" and poked fun at him and his insane conspiracy theories, mentioning how some Iraqis refer to Cole's site as "Misinformed Comment," a play on the title of his web page "Informed Comment."

The Bay2beirut weblog writes:

"So what does Cole do? What he does best. Weave conspiracy theories that of course involve the Neocons (see that second link to IraqPundit for another one of those) on how Iraq The Model is 'suspicious' and how 'far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion' the posters are. Yes you heard right. An Iraqi site, whose authors have formed a pro-democracy liberal Iraqi party, based in Iraq, living through the war and its dangers (esp. when Cole's favorite, Sadr, was bullying other Iraqis and when Jihadists are killing anyone pro-American, while Cole is sitting pontificating from his Michigan office) is not reflective of Iraqi opinion, which Juan Cole is supposedly an expert on! The pretentious self-importance is nauseating.

"But there's more. This amounts to the worst 'Orientalism' (in the Saidian sense) there is. It presumes that Iraqi opinion must not only be monolithic, but it must also conform to an anti-US, pro-Arabist party line (because Arabism is the 'authentic' voice of the East)! Or, it must be what Juan Cole says it is! If not, it's an attempt 'to spread disinformation ... It is a technique made for the well-funded Neoconservatives,' i.e., not only must 'Arabs' have one opinion, but if they are dissenters then they are passive agents of manipulation by outside (Jewish) forces! (Iraq the Model was quoted by Wolfowitz a while ago in a WSJ op-ed. Well that 'proves' they're Neocons!)"

Another weblog operated by pro-democracy Iraqis, IraqtheModel, writes:

"I came across this article by Dr Juan Cole that made me feel ashamed of myself. This man who doesn?t live in Iraq seems to know more about the history of Iraq than I do. In his article he was criticizing the westerns, journalists in particular, for making judgments without knowing much about Iraq?s history, which I must admit is true..... What Dr. Cole was trying to tell us, as you can see in his article, is that Fallujah is celebrated in Iraq?s history as a symbol for the large rebellion/revolution against the British back in 1920."

The blogger then notes that no such incident ever took place. Fallujah was under the control of the British army the whole time.

Cole ponticiates a lot about "democracy." So what exactly is Cole's idea of Middle East democracy? Not Israel of course. It is Syria, where 99.75 percent of the citizens ?voted? for the dictator in power. Syria?s elections are even better exercises in democracy than American presidential ballots, according to Cole.

In a New York Times editorial, Cole said that he saw the elections in Syria as a model for other Arab countries to follow. ?The last thing the Arab people need is a red herring like ?free and open elections? to distract them from the international Zionist/Neo-Con conspiracy to take their oil.? Professor Cole then added that President Assad?s ability to gain such a high percentage of the vote ?all the while maintaining an oligarchic cult of personality oppressive regime mired in nepotism and corruption? was ?truly impressive? and a positive sign of ?Arab solidarity.?

Cole was one of the people spreading around anti-Semitic blood libels about Israel before the invasion of Iraq, claiming that Israel was going to commit atrocities and mass murders against Palestinians as soon as the Allies landed in Iraq. He once wrote that Larry Franklin had "a Brooklyn accent" even though "he himself was not Jewish." Nevertheless he was close to Wolfowitz and "the predominantly Jewish Neoconservatives" and thus he was part of "a clever scheme." Cole also cast suspicions on Sephardic Jews for possibly being infiltrated by the Mossad.

Cole responds to criticism of his fanaticism and doubts about his scholarship by groups like Campus Watch or individuals like Martin Kramer, with ad hominem shrieks, threats, and insults. He routinely sends letters to people like Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, threatening to sue them criticizing Cole's writings and statements. He sees Jewish cabals manipulating the Pentagon and other organs of power, including when Arabs whom he dislikes are involved. He has written: "The FBI should investigate how Phares, an undistinguished (Arab) academic with links to far rightwing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the 'terrorism analyst' at MSNBC."

Andrew Sullivan, who is not Jewish, thinks Cole is an anti-American crackpot. He adds: "If you ask me, that's why the far-left Middle East academic elite has had so little influence over this debate. Their shrillness crowds out their expertise."

Cole himself was targeted by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which threatened to sue him for lies he published about MEMRI's finances?claims which, according to MEMRI's president Yigal Carmon, were factually untrue. Cole claimed that MEMRI was funded "to the tune of $60 million a year" (an absurd figure), that MEMRI is biased, and that it is somehow linked to the Likud party. MEMRI demanded a retraction on all three points, and threatened Cole with possible legal action if he fails to do so.

Lately scholar Cole has turned to historic revisionism and simple misrepresentation to serve his political agenda when it comes to Lebanon. He tells his readers (yes, he has more than one reader) that, first, "The Israelis expelled 100,000 or so Palestinians north to Lebanon in 1948." (Expelled? Maybe these were people who lost their war to annihilate Israel and fled at the orders of the Arab militia commanders?) Then, "The prospect of a PLO-dominated Lebanon scared the Syrians. Yasser Arafat would have been able to provoke battles with Israel at will, into which Syria might be drawn. Hafez al-Asad determined to intervene to stop it. First he sought a green light from the Israelis through Kissinger. He got it." The Syrians were hardly upset about the prospect of PLO power in Syria, which they had long promoted and built up. Some of the PLO's component organizations had their offices in Damascus. Kissinger did not invite the Syrians to annex Lebanon and the civil war wa
s only
the pretext for Asa to pursue his imperial ambitions regarding Lebanon.

Then Cole adds, "In 1982 the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon as Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO in Beirut." [Unprovoked apparently means that terrorists operating against Israel freely in Lebanon, firing missiles and rockets and mortars, only killed Jewish Untermenschen and so these murders and aggressions should not count.]

Now in reality, the Syrian gobbling up of Lebanon was part of Syria's official doctrine of "Greater Syria," which holds that all of Israel and Jordan and Lebanon rightfully belong to Syria and are simply under temporary alien control. Syrian maps often portray all of Israel and Lebanon as southern Syria. Guess the learned Cole never heard about that doctrine. Just like he routinely refers to the "policies and decisions of Tel Aviv". Seems he has never discovered that Jerusalem is where Israel's capital and government sit. Tel Aviv is where you can go to the beach.

But Old Juan Cole's biggest fear these days is that President Bush might get some of the credit for Syria's sudden pusillanimous behavior. Cole writes, "I don't think Bush had anything much to do with the current Lebanese national movement except at the margins." Gosh, we would not want anyone to credit Bush's removals of the Taliban and of the Ba'athists in Iraq to be getting any credit.

It is very common among leftwing extremists to find that their entire world view is based on reversing causes and effects. You know, kind of how Hiroshima was the cause of Pearl Harbor. Comrade Cole seems to have based much of his "academic" career on such inversions. Consider his diatribe on the History News network, "Want to End Terrorism? End Foreign Occupations." This is a classic in the genre. It claims that Iraqi terrorism is a byproduct of Allied "occupation" of Iraq, and also of course that Palestinian terrorism is a byproduct of Israel's occupation of "Palestinian lands".

Here is Cole at his most vociferous and least scholarly:

"You want to end terrorism? End unjust military occupations. By all means have Syria conduct an orderly withdrawal from Lebanon if that is what the Lebanese public wants. But Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, as well. The Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank must be ended."

Now Palestinian anti-Jewish terrorism actually began in the 1920s, back when "Palestine" was governed by the British, under a League of Nations Mandate, after Britain freed it from its Turkish colonial rulers. Palestinian anti-civilian atrocities escalated in the 1950s, conducted by "fedayeen" terrorists sponsored by Egypt and other Arab fascist regimes. Let us emphasize that all of this was many years before the Six Day War of 1967. In other words, neither Gaza nor the West Bank were "occupied" by Israel when Palestinian terrorism developed and escalated. Instead, they were occupied by Egypt and Jordan (the latter illegally holding the West Bank). Egypt and Jordan could have set up a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip had they wished to, any time between 1949 and 1967, without the need even to ask Israel what it thought.

Cole likes to denounce Israel for its "land grab". Let us note that this is the same Israel that is the size of Massachusetts and whose land in total is far less than 1% of the land controlled by the 22 Arab states. This is the same Cole who refers to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, while the suburbs around the actual capital, Jerusalem, are "illicit land grabs". As far as we know, Cole has never denounced Ann Arbor as an illicit grab of Indian lands nor offered to restore his own real property there to those Native tribes from whom he grabbed it.

Cole routinely refers to Middle East terrorists as "guerillas". He defends Hizbollah thus:

"It (Hizbollah) cannot simply be ignored or dismissed as a terrorist organization. Hizbullah isn't that different from the Dawa Party or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which the US just helped to power in Iraq."

Cole's rantings sometimes remind us of the logic one finds on neonazi web magazines. Here is Cole again: "When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in steets, as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers." Once again, Cole is reversing cause and effect. He absolutely refuses to consider the possibility that Israel's gunships were operating because the PLO was sheltering, sponsoring and assisting suicide bombers to conduct mass murders of Israeli civilians, many of them childfren.

In Cole's view, these choppers were just shooting for absolutely no reason, just because the "proto fascists" in Israel, who were not elected the same way Cole's democratic Assads were, felt like it, maybe were having a bad hair day. It never occurs to Cole that, had the PLO complied with its Oslo obligations and prevented terror attacks on Israel, no Israeli choppers would be targeting Palestinian terror leaders at all, and no Palestinian civilians would get hurt in the fire.

In the same article, Cole cites as his scholarly source Uri Avnery, who in fact is an Israeli cross between Larry Flint and Lord Haw Haw, an anti-Israel street protesters with no academic credentials, which is why Alexander Cockburn also uses him. Perhaps the University of Michigan's Department of Middle East Studies should be renamed the Department of Duh.

Now if we were to test the Cole Doctrine on history, it fails. US occupation of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Diego Garcia, and Samoa have never produced terror. Soviet occupation of the Baltics and Siberia did not either. Romanian occupation of Transylvania has not. Italian occupation of Sardinia has not. Spain's occupation of enclaves on the North Moroccan coast has not. Nor has China's occupation of its Moslem colonies and Tibet. Nor Turkey's "occupation" of Syria's Alexandretta region.

On the other hand, there are lots of examples of terrorism arising where there is no occupation. The Moslem terror against Malaysia, Thailand, and Algeria, the Bader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen, the Hizbollah terror against Israel AFTER it fully withdrew from Lebanese soil, the Michigan militia that bombed Oklahoma City, all these are examples of terror in spite of the absence of occupation.

Cole is incapable of placing any "occupation" in historic context, nor of asking what produces occupation. In fact, Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza (which are more "Jewish Lands" than they ever were "Palestinian", in any case) was a consequence of Arab terror and aggression against Israel, not their cause. The Arabs attacked Israel in 1967 when it was not occupying anything except Israel. (Why will be excused if we suspect that Cole regards Tel Aviv and Haifa as illicit occupations of Palestinian lands as well.)

The West Bank and Gaza were "occupied" in Israel's counterattack against aggression. The Golan Heights had belonged to Syria before 1967, although its claims to it were dubious even back then; the only use the Syrians made of the Golan Heights was to bombard Israeli civilians in the Galilee. Israel's annexation of the Golan after the war is also one of those "occupations" that Abu Cole thinks must be ended.

Cole says, "People need a sense of autonomy and dignity, and occupation produces helplessness and humiliation. Humiliation is what causes terrorism." Actually occupation is a consequence of fascist aggression, not its cause. The American occupation of Germany and Japan was just like the Israeli "occupation" of "Palestinians". The difference is that the Germans and Japanese underwent denazification. So terror is in fact the consequence of an absence of denazification. Humiliation prevents terrorism. Ask the Germans and the Japanese.

Cole has consistently opposed any form of anti-terrorist campaign by the US, other than capitulation to terrorist demands. He denied Saddam had any terror connections at all: " The idea that Iraq is deliberately harboring Islamist terrorists is absurd, since the Baathists would be afraid of them themselves."

Here is the Cole take on bin Laden and 9-11, taken from the pro-al-Qaeda "antiwar.com" web site:

"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason."

He then adds: "Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its."

Cole's atrociously-written rants are not simply the proliferation of shallow and whacky ideas about the Middle East. Cole is a horrendous writer in general, who can barely construct a proper sentence, and sometimes spouts juvenile nonsense about other things besides the Middle East. Consider the following:

"Before the rise of the neocons in the 1970s, it was well understood by minority communities in the United States that they had to work against bigotry in general. Because if an atmosphere was created or allowed to persist that allowed one minority group to be targeted, it had the potential to boomerang on the others, as well. Racialist hatred is no respecter (sic) of persons. Now I perceive a cockiness among some minorities in the U.S., such that they--former victims of discrimination--advocate
racial profiling and discrimination, even demonization, for some. I solemnly predict that if they continue on this path, they will eventually come deeply to regret it, as shall we all."

Cole recently went ballistic in response to comments by Fred Ikle in the Wall Street Journal, who wrote:

"Those who out of cowardice use their wealth to pay danegeld to the preachers of hate and destruction must be taught that this aggression will boomerang. A nuclear war stirred up against the 'infidels' might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters."

Cole denounced Ikle as "racist, ignorant and monstrous. Why aren't Paul Gigot and James Taranto forced to resign over this monstrosity?" My guess is that Ikle can correctly name the capital of Israel, unlike Cole. Moslem atrocities are not racist and monstrous, in Cole's opinion. He writes, " What is the difference between talking about nuking Mecca for political purposes and Mulla Omar's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which was rightly denounced as barbaric? The difference is that no human beings were vaporized at Bamiyan." In other words, non-nuclear atrocities just do not count. Why isn't Cole fired by U-M because of his anti-Semitism?

To sum things up, the entire thesis concerning "occupation" and terror by the learned Cole is a pile of crock. Cole is incapable of going beyond his bumper-stick-depth methodology of analysis by slogan. After all, if the Russian occupation of Afghanistan triggered terror, as did Indian "occupation" of Kashmir, this must mean that Middle East terror is a desperate act of protest against US and Israeli occupiers and helicopters.

I have long believed that anti-Israel and anti-American MESA profs should be called gnats. That would make our Juan the Gnat-King Cole! Cole's claims to being an expert on the Middle East are about as persuasive as Ward Churchill's claims to being an Indian chief.

(To view
clean article
with all the links, go to
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17422)

2. A New anti-Terror SDS
Those of us old enough to have prostate problems surely remember the old
anti-American extremist group from the 60s calling itself the "SDS =
Students for a Democratic Society." That SDS wanted democracy of the sort
to be found in the Democratic Republic of East Germany.

Anyway, now there is a new SDS worth noting, the Suspect Detection
Systems. It is an Israeli high-tech startup that just signed a contract
with US Transportation Security Administration, which is responsible for
airport security. SDS produces a portable polygraph that can detect
terrorists even when they are not carrying anything made of metal. A
demonstration project is being implemented at a New Jersey airport.
Passengers place their hands on a detector and tell a truth or a fib.

We expect the ACLU and other graduates of the OLD SDS to be up in arms at
this infringement of the constitutional right to lie. Heck, who knows
where use of the device could lead - maybe even to racial profiling!

SDS employs 12 people in a town outside Tel Aviv.