Juan Cole is a professor of Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He's also a blogger. Prof. Cole is a very important person. If you don't believe me, just ask him.
Not everyone, however, is as enamored with Prof. Cole as he is with himself. Christopher Hitchens describes him as "a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed….who affects such expertise in Persian, cannot decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English".
Yale University shared the same opinion, when in 2006, it denied him a faculty position, based on an assessment of Cole's scholarly work. Very Important Person Cole blamed his rejection at an Ivy League university on "a concerted press campaign by neoconservatives…(which) was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity".
The main problem, among many, with Prof. Cole is that he lies. He gets called out for it. He retro-edits his lies and denounces the denouncer. He's like a kid with a sore tooth who can't keep his tongue away from it.
Some "for instances":
This policy was implemented in 1991 under Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney and Pres. George H. W. Bush.
I have learned from Martin Kramer to capture a screenshot of Prof. Cole's writings if I want to reference them in the future because of his retro-editing and deleting penchants.
In Jan 2009, Cole posted this:
In response, Martin Kramer posted this: Actually, Atta's will was dated April 11, 1996—one week before the Qana tragedy, on April 18. We don't know for certain why he made it, but it cannot be because he witnessed any footage from Qana, which was still in the future. And Cole apparently never read the will. It contains no pledge to die while avenging anyone. The will deals with disposition of Atta's body and possessions in the event of his death. It's not a "martyrdom will," but a standardized one, provided by Atta's Hamburg mosque. (You can read the full text here.)
Update: In the wake of this post, Cole has partly retro-edited his own post (without indicating so).
Today IraqPundit blogged about Prof. Cole's latest lying-fest.
Wonder how long it will be before he retro-edits?