Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, is arguably one of the most tendentious academics in the country. Here is his latest risible contention:
Scholars are like canaries in a mine. They are on the cutting edge of research, and most sensitive to dangers in a society. If you silence them, you’re poking out the eyes of society.
As Martin Kramer and others have shown, he and many of his colleagues in Middle East studies indeed stand on the cutting edge – the cutting edge of blatantly anti-Western perspectives. They are blatantly insensitive to the deadly threat we face in the war by Islamic terrorists against us. And, it is they who have systematically silenced dissenting voices on the most dangerous issues of the day, primarily by ostracizing such dissenters from their ranks.