Blogger Michael Rubin calls historian Juan Cole a hypocrite

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Civil-Military Relations; and a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has demanded an explanation from Yale University about whether the George W. Bush administration interfered with or intimidated the university prior to Yale’s rejection of University of Michigan professor and polemicist Juan Cole’s application to teach at Yale. (Curiously, MESA neglects to mention the failure of Juan Cole’s job application at Duke the same year, where professors found him arrogant, self-serving, and superficial)....

1)  Should MESA truly value free speech above politics, should it not then condemn none other than Juan Cole who demanded the FBI investigate a fellow professor with whose politics Cole disagreed? As Cole wrote in 2004: “FBI should investigate how [Professor Walid] Pharis, an undistinguished academic with links to far rightwing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the ‘terrorism analyst’ at MSNBC.”

2) Likewise, while Cole said he was disinvited from events, after the FBI arrested former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin on allegations he shared sensitive documents with AIPAC, Cole bragged about how he had spurned Defense Department invitations to discuss Iraq. “In a conversation with me, Franklin indicated that he was in very close contact with Wolfowitz, and he offered to get me an audience. I said, “You don’t read my web log, do you?”...