Amid all the hysteria about the Confederate flag in the aftermath of Dylann Storm Roof’s racial murders in Charleston, South Carolina, at least one purveyor of the “Islamophobia” myth has found a way to link the murders to his hobbyhorse.
University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, showing an imaginative reach that would arouse envy in J. K. Rowling, blames Roof’s murders on … Pamela Geller and me. He reveals how uninterested in truth and rational analysis the academic Left and the “Islamophobia”-mongers really are.
But give Cole points for trying: his is a creative attempt to validate the Left’s obsessive insistence that opposition to jihad terror is “racism.” But to say his case founders on the facts is to understate the situation.
Cole grandly announces:
The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto. … [T]hese same hatemongers helped whip Norwegian white supremacist and terrorist Anders Brevik [sic] into a homocidal [sic] fever pitch in July of 2011, when he killed 77 Norwegians for allegedly being soft on Muslims.
…
[Breivik’s] passions were whipped up … by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose ‘Campus Watch’ is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).
That Breivik was a lone psychopath, not the vanguard of an army of “right-wing terrorists” stirred up by Pamela Geller and me, has been for nearly four years now a keen disappointment to Cole and his comrades.
In their need for bogeymen, they have no alternative other than to keeping trotting him out. They hope that their readers won’t notice his murders were singular and not part of a movement, that they took place years ago, and that Breivik himself criticized me and the others who are supposed to have incited him to homicidal rage for being “to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance.”
In other words: Anders Breivik hated us for rejecting violence, which according to Juan Cole we’re supposed to have goaded him to commit.
Even more devastating for Cole’s argument: contrary to Cole’s claim about Dylann Storm Roof’s insane “manifesto,” Roof never once mentions me, or Pamela Geller, or Geert Wilders, or Marine LePen, or Daniel Pipes, or Islam, or Muslims.
One would think that would be enough to make the keenest smear artist blush, and hesitate to account us responsible for the Roof’s murders. But that doesn’t stop Juan Cole. He and his ilk among the academic Left and its Islamic supremacist allies so hate and fear us now that no leap of logic, no abandonment of rationality is too great if it affords them a chance to demonize us.
Why this venomous hatred? What about Pamela Geller and me moves Juan Cole to such a towering rage that he will make himself look like an idiot to defame us?
Here is a clue: Juan Cole is on the Board of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been established in court as a front group lobbying for the Islamic regime in Iran.
Writes Michael Rubin:
Jamal Abdi, NIAC’s policy director, now appears to push aside any pretense that NIAC is something other than Iran’s lobby. Speaking at the forthcoming “Expose AIPAC” conference, Abdi is featured on the “Training: Constituent Lobbying for Iran” panel. Oops.
Cole also spends a great deal of time in his post on the fact that Geller and Pipes are Jewish.
The increasingly open anti-Semitism of the academic Left is as troubling, and as obvious, as its descent into indoctrination and character assassination as substitutes for rational debate and engagement with its ideological opponents. Cole, for all his handwringing about our baneful influence, would never dare debate me or Pamela Geller or anyone else he is so intent to defame.
When one has as willingly and even eagerly foregone the use of the tools of genuine intellectual discourse in favor of propaganda and defamation as he has, one fears taking them up again, particularly in a debate setting. When one has become used to playing Julius Streicher, it becomes more and more of a stretch to play Abe Lincoln (or Stephen A. Douglas).
He knows, in other words, that he’d get waxed. The truth has a way of coming out, despite the best efforts of people like Juan Cole to obscure it.
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