« I just don't get it | Main | The coming Democratic meltdown »
May 04, 2006
That's gotta hurt!
Hugh Hewitt conducted a knockout interview with Christopher Hitchens about the self-proclaimed maven of all things Arab, Juan Cole.
CH: Well, some of your listeners may know of Professor Cole of the University of Michigan. He is acclaimed, at least by himself, expert on matters Shiia, particularly, and he also says he's fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu. And for all I know, he is.
But he's 10th rate, and he's a sordid apologist for Islamist terrorism, and for Islamist terrorist regimes. And I've been on his case for a while.
But he recently wrote ... that Ahmadinejead had never said that about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, and neither had his role model, Ayatollah Khomeini. They'd never said it. It was a sort of slander.
So I thought well, this isn't going to take me very long. And I have a lot of Iranian friends who, alas for them, can't live in their own country anymore, because of the hideous tyranny there, and who hate people who make excuses for their regime, as they should. And with their help, I was able to show very easily what I had long known, that Khomeini's statement that Israel must be completely destroyed has been a canonical statement in Iran for a long time. Ahmadinejead was only repeating it. He probably was a bit surprised at how much attention it got, given how commonplace the thought is to him.
But that it is nothing but a lie to say that this is not a statement from the Iranian theocrats, and it also suggests very strongly, which is the fun bit, that Professor Juan Cole does not know what he is talking about, in any language.
HH: (laughing)
CH: His English is, by the way, very poor. I can't believe his Persian is excellent, because his English is lousy ... He knows no history, he has no policies. He is a complete dim bulb, and well, I must say, I took pleasure in pointing this out.
[...]
I mean, he writes as if he's drunk, because you have to, the sentences are made up of syntactical train wrecks. But I don't think it's alcohol in his case. I think it's illiteracy, simply.
Then Hitchens gets mean.
Read the whole interview -- but listen to it to get the full effect of the contempt dripping from every syllable Hitch utters.
Oh, did I mention Yale University is considering making Cole the head of their Middle East Studies Department? Why aren't you surprised?
Posted by Mike Lief at May 4, 2006 12:22 AM
| TrackBack