Efraim Karsh takes a nice swipe at Cole in The New Republic . Though, frankly, I think he’s too soft on him.

One point Karsh lays out nicely is the extent to which Cole dismisses Arab Anti-Semitism as a modern problem, purely the result of Israel’s settlement policies and the like. Karsh writes:

Cole glibly claims, “[T]o any extent that contemporary Muslims have a problem with Jews, it is largely driven by what they see as injustices done by Zionists to the Palestinians.” Such ahistorical analysis ignores a deep anti-Jewish bigotry that dates to Islam’s earliest days and reflects the prophet Muhammad’s outrage over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish community. To his credit, Cole criticized the Egyptian government’s 2002 decision to air a TV serial based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulent anti-Semitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century that alleges an organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. But the line of argument he uses repeats the same ahistorical belief that the Protocols are a recent alien import to Arab societies that “had no particular resonances in the Muslim world (outside a few radical Muslim cliques) until the past couple of decades.”
Cole should know better than that. The Protocols have been a staple of Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism since the early twentieth century, published in numerous editions and in several different translations, including one by the brother of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. (Nasser himself would recommend the pamphlet as a useful guide to the “Jewish mind,” as would his successor, Anwar Sadat, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, and Yasir Arafat, among many others.) Less than a year after their airing on Egyptian television, the Protocols were saliently displayed alongside a Torah scroll in an exhibition at the newly built Alexandria library.

This reminds me of a passage from a Derb column from a long time ago:

But, okay, let’s suppose there is some valid moral objection to the existence of the settlements; and let’s suppose my reader’s plan were to be carried out, and all the settlements were removed, their populations transferred back to metropolitan Israel, their buildings razed, their fields ploughed with salt. Does anybody think it would make a damn bit of difference? There was no such thing as settlements, no such thing as “occupied territories,” before the 1967 war. There were no such things in 1960, for example, when Adolf Eichmann was abducted from his hiding-hole in Buenos Aires by Israeli secret agents, an event recorded by Saudi Arabia’s principal government-controlled newspaper as: “ARREST OF EICHMANN, WHO HAD THE HONOR OF KILLING 6 MILLION JEWS”.