Navel Gazing

I'll try to keep the inter-blog commentary to a minimum - it feels too much like high school gossip - but this was too perfect. Jonah Goldberg, right-winger who ludicrously claimed to "popularize" the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" before the war in Iraq (if only it hadn't been coined by one of television's most popular shows...) took on Juan Cole, a Middle Eastern Studies professor who maintains one of the best blogs for said issues, Informed Comment. Now, Cole writes much of his blog in standard academic tones, but every once in a while he lays a smackdown. And when he does, oh boy is it good.

It starts here, with this glorious opening:

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

It continues here, with the near-audible smack as Goldberg's flabby, overfed, underinformed reputation lies in ruins:

Poor Jonah can't get anything right when it comes to me. He tries to imply that I don't speak Arabic, citing a comment by As'ad Abukhalil on my recent al-Jazeerah appearance. As`ad praises me for apologizing to al-Jazeerah readers for not speaking Arabic in the bulk of the interview. What he didn't say was that I began by speaking in Arabic and I apologized in Arabic. I said I preferred to speak English because the subject required exactitude... I know three kinds of Arabic-- Modern Standard, Lebanese dialect and Egyptian dialect. My Arabic is not free of solecisms because I didn't start it until I was an adult, and sometimes something from one of the three slips into the other. But I did live in the Arab world nearly 6 years altogether, and do speak the language. Sorry, Jonah, the problem with not knowing what you are talking about is that you get things wrong. [emphasis added]

A bit more about Cole: He lived as an American in Lebanon during the civil war there, so anyone who wants to pick a fight with him, or accuse him of not understanding war, or of not knowing the Middle East, is just asking for pain. Luckily for us, he's on our side. I would especially reccomend the second piece of Cole's I linked to, because he goes in to a bit more of an explanation for why destroying people like Goldberg is so important for the continued peace of the world.