Jonah linked to this yesterday on the Corner, but I’m linking here too because you can’t miss this. Here’s a recap:

Journalist Steven Vincent was assassinated in Iraq after he wrote an an op-ed in the NY Times criticizing the Iraqi police force and the British officials in charge of Basra. It is likely that he was killed by those elements of the Iraqi police he criticized. Then, the British officials investigating his death leaked to the press that Vincent had been planning to marry his interpreter, who had been wounded in the attack; insinuated that the two were romantically involved; and speculated that Vincent’s death had probably been an “honor killing” by local men angered at the impropriety.

Juan Cole jumped all over this speculation, writing in his blog:

Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

Not only does this go against the principle that the simplest explanation tends to be correct, it seems calculated to settle some personal grudge. At the time, Martin Kramer pointed out that Vincent had criticized Cole’s sympathy for the Iraqi “resistance” and his disdain for those Iraqis actually trying to rebuild their country. (Juan Cole, you may recall, had previously asked his friends over at Daily Kos to do “Oppo Research” on Kramer after he criticized Cole’s practice of frequently modifying his posts without posting corrections.)

Now, Steven Vincent’s widow has written to Cole to explain to him that there are lines that you can’t cross and still expect to be respected. Cole has crossed that line. Here’s Lisa Ramaci-Vincent:

Yes, Steven was aggressive in criticizing what he saw around him and did not like. It’s called courage, and it happens to be a tradition in the history of this country. Without this tradition there would have been no Revolutionary War, no Civil War, no civil rights movement, no a lot of things that America can be proud of. He had made many friends in Iraq, and was afraid for them if the religious fundamentalists were given the country to run under shari’a. You may dismiss that as naive, simplistic, foolish, but I say to you, as you sit safely in your ivory tower in Michigan with nothing threatening your comfy, tenured existence, that you should be ashamed at the depths to which you have sunk by libeling Steven and Nour. They were on the front lines, risking all, in an attempt to call attention to the growing storm threatening to overwhelm a fragile and fledgling experiment in democracy, trying to get the world to see that all was not right in Iraq. And for their efforts, Steven is dead and Nour is recuperating with three bullet wound in her back. Yes, that’s right – the “honorable” men who abducted them, after binding them, holding them captive and beating them, set them free, told them to run – and then shot them both in the back. I’ve seen the autopsy report.
You did not know him – you did not have that honor, and you will never have the chance, thanks to the murderous goons for whom you have appointed yourself an apologist.

Here’s hoping from now on, Cole will get all the respect he deserves.