US - Juan Cole in hole - digs

The much discredited and favorite BBC go to man on the Mid East, finds himself in yet another hole - and digs.

The online fight this time is over whether or not Iran's President said Israel should be wiped off the map - he did. Andrew Sullivan explains.

Moreover, reading Hitch's piece and Cole's and a neutral translation of Ahmadinejad's disputed speech, I cannot help but believe that Cole, as he concedes, got his first take wrong, and then deliberately misled readers in his second version.

Read the whole thing, but here's Sullivan's conclusion.

It seems to me that Cole is trying to imply that Ahmadinejad is referring solely to the occupation of Jerusalem, and making a metaphysical or metaphorical point rather than an empirical one. But the full text proves definitively otherwise. Ahmadinejad is clearly referring to the "occupation" of the entire land of Israel, not just the West Bank, Gaza or parts or the whole of Jerusalem. He sees it as stretching back 50 years (before Israel controlled all of Jerusalem). He utterly rejects the withdrawal from Gaza or the West Bank as sufficient. And he wants the country wiped off the map - and even erased from the historical record. Cole's rhetorical sleight of hand strikes me as deliberate deception, an attempt to deny the existence of a real genocidal evil in the world that Cole himself knows exists. Why? You decide. But Cole has exposed himself more brutally than Hitch ever could.

Here's a good round up of Cole's problems with the truth and rewriting history.
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