The Young Curmudgeon: Cole Kerfuffle Roundup

December 15, 2004

Cole Kerfuffle Roundup

Judith Weiss has a scarily comprehensive collection of links related to University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole's (most) recent foray into internet-trolling and conspiracy-mongering. Here are some of the links she dug up which I found the most interesting:

LA journalist Cathy Seipp, much like myself, has had a lot of online run-ins with the cranks who inspired the professor's conspiracy-theorizing. One of them shows up in the comments to that post for some trolling, just to give you an idea what we're dealing with here. (Also of note: In the comments to that post I found out that this guy named David Ehrenstein, who used to leave the most hysterical, shrieking troll posts on Jay Rosen's Press Think weblog isn't just some random internet troll but is a real published author/journalist, with actual, books, articles etc. to his name. Scary.)

Later Seipp writes about attending the LA blogger meeting with Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model and about professor Cole's smear:

Now you might assume that a pro-America, pro-democracy Baghdad blog would be considered a good thing across the political spectrum here in the U.S., but unfortunately you would be wrong. Lefty bloggers are complaining that most Iraqis are not as pro-America as the Iraq the Model brothers, which might be true (although Omar and Mohammad, who like Saddam and his crew are Sunni, argue vehemently to the contrary), but so what? Should we have refused to support the French Resistance in World War II because so many of their countrymen sympathized with the Vichy government? Or -- a better analogy -- if some Americans had tried to discredit anti-Nazi, pro-U.S. Germans after the War (because after all, Hitler had the support of the masses) should they have expected anyone here other than the American Nazi Party to take them seriously?

Roger [Roger L. Simon-ed.] asked Omar and Mohammed about the Michigan professor Juan Cole's suggestion that the brothers are really CIA spies. They laughed, and made motions to pull off masks like Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible." And for the record, they added that no, they are not backed by the CIA "People also used to accuse us of not being really Iraqi," Omar added. "Then finally they had to admit that, OK, we are Iraqi."

She then goes on to name and link the attention-starved individuals who started this whole thing, yet again, but seems to be starting to realize that that's the wrong approach:

I keep half-expecting, for instance, that Joseph and his friends at the local lefty group blog Martini Republic -- which provided Juan Cole (whom Totten notes has been described by one of his students as a "hypocritical, double-standard-spouting apologist for racism and religious fascism") with the Iraq-the-Model-is-really-CIA idea -- will show some sense of humor, or at least proportion, about themselves. But they never do, so I've begun to think that teasing them is like poking a small animal with a sharp stick.

Also, since MR gets terribly distressed when they feel they're being ignored (a corollary is how touchingly thrilled they were this week when Cole's link brought them a bunch of actual comments), I couldn't help but wince when Roger mentioned the Nutty Professor (as he calls him) in his CIA question to Omar and Mohammed, but not MR or Joseph. Jeff Jarvis referred to Joseph as "the twit to whom Cole links" but refused to "dignify his paranoid crap with a link" himself.

But still Seipp gives these guys get yet another link,they come back for yet more trolling, and so the cycle continues. Vive la blogosphere! Despite the tiredness of this whole little show, I did get to see this post by blogger xlrq out of it, which is very funny and also shows just how far back this oh-so-70s CIA fixation goes for these guys. It's truly a brave new world when a desperate plea for attention by some random loser in LA can almost instantaneously be endorsed by a prominent professor in Michigan, broadcast throughout the world, and just as quickly picked apart by journalists and bloggers in New York, LA, Portland, Iraq, and elsewhere. It reminds me of the controversy over that play by Tim Robbins, Embedded, a predictably ultra-left take on the Iraq war written by Robbins himself. Robbins' opus trafficked, of course, in paranoid conspiracy theories about "neo-cons", which were partially backed up by a misquotation of Leo Strauss. It later turned out that this misquotation, and some of the conspiracy theories, originated from none other than uber-crackpot Lyndon Larouche. It looks like professor Cole is in similar territory to Tim Robbins here. In the internet age it's easy for supposedly respectable people to get willingly taken in by crackpot conspiracy theories which match their political notions, and even easier for the sordid origins of those theories to be exposed. What's bizarre in this case is how obviously flaky the origins of professor Cole's smear were (I mean we're talking about a guy who was well-known for making political troll posts on the message boards at investing site The Motley Fool here.) and how willing Cole was to broadcast those origins anyway.

Posted by Eric Deamer on December 15, 2004 at 10:02 PM | Permalink

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» The Spirit of America link-fest was getting so long . . . from Kesher Talk
. . . I put the Juan Cole/Iraq the Model feud here. Go here to read what all the bloggers and journalists have to say about Omar and Mohammed's December 2004 tour of America, and check back frequently for... [Read More]

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The Young Curmudgeon

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December 15, 2004

Cole Kerfuffle Roundup

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