Juan Cole over at Informed Comment was recently threatened with a libel lawsuit by Colonel Yigal Carmon due to his characterization of MEMRI as a well-funded organization dedicated to cherry-picking Arab news reports to show the Arab world in a negative light. Clearly, such threats are ridiculous and are simply meant to stifle debate. When this sort of thing happens, all of us in the blogosphere need to band together to support our freedom of speech. I suggest that everyone link to Informed Comment on their sites to give Juan Cole even greater exposure.
Very interesting. Thank you for bringing this issue to light. I have to look into this much more before I give an opinion, but something important seems to be broiling up here. Juan Cole has apparantly hit a nerve.
It's these nerve centers we have to find. Everytime the forces of deception try to silence dissent, we can be reasonably certain that another nerve has been found.
Juan Cole is standing his ground:
[Cole says: Thanks, Henry. The University Counsel and I spoke, and he underlined that the University of Michigan would never take a position on faculty speech and I can assure readers that there isn't the remotest possibility that the hallowed Home of the Wolverines would take such a clumsy feint seriously.]
Posted by: diana at November 26, 2004 02:22 AMVery interesting. Thank you for bringing this issue to light. I have to look into this much more before I give an opinion, but something important seems to be broiling up here. Juan Cole has apparantly hit a nerve.
It's these nerve centers we have to find. Everytime the forces of deception try to silence dissent, we can be reasonably certain that another nerve has been found.
Juan Cole is standing his ground:
[Cole says: Thanks, Henry. The University Counsel and I spoke, and he underlined that the University of Michigan would never take a position on faculty speech and I can assure readers that there isn't the remotest possibility that the hallowed Home of the Wolverines would take such a clumsy feint seriously.]
Posted by: diana at November 26, 2004 02:23 AMThis is probably the never he hit:
Kurt Nimmo appears convinced that MEMRI is a black psy-ops project of Israeli military intelligence aimed at shaping Western public opinion in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim directions.
Posted by: supa at November 26, 2004 08:46 AMMore details, including the letter from Colonel Yigal Carmon to Juan Cole, are here:
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/blog_of_blogs.php
hmm... this is interesting in light of what I just wrote about evangelicals on "Parading Jesus."
"MEMRI's stance is that it is opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, not Islam itself, although the integrity of this position may be questioned because of links on MEMRI's website to certain evangelical Christian organizations who take a harder line on Islam."
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=MEMRI:_Middle_East_Media_Research_Institute
Posted by: diana at November 27, 2004 08:52 AM