Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Juan Cole

Showing posts with label Juan Cole. Show all posts

Sunday, March 20, 2022

Idiot Juan Cole explains the reason Israelis are happy and Palestinians are not: The Jews are stealing Palestinian happiness!

Twelfth-rate academic Juan Cole notes that in the latest UN World Happiness Report, Israel ranks as the ninth happiest nation in the world and the Palestinian Territories ranks 122nd out of 146 rated areas.

Of course, he must explain how this happened using his own twisted Jew-hating logic. It is, he says, "happiness apartheid."

The per capita income of Palestinians is $3751 a year. The UN estimates that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories has taken out $57 billion since 2000 from their economy that would otherwise have been there, spurring growth. The Palestinian gross domestic product would be 3 times bigger today without that interference.

Israeli per capita income is $34,185 nearly 10 times greater than that of Palestine. Some of that income is produced by usurping land and resources from the Palestinians.

There you go! Jews are stealing Palestinian happiness!

But not only that: Jews are stealing Palestinian health, too!

Palestinian life expectancy in 2019 was 74 years. Because Israel declined to vaccinate most of the people living under its military occupation against COVID-19, it has likely fallen.

Live expectancy in Israel is about 83 years. Again, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett rules both people, directly administering 60% of the West Bank and using the Palestine Authority as his policeman for the other 40%. Yet some of the population he rules drop dead 9 years before the others.

There you have it. The Jews are not only stealing Palestinian land and life expectancy and freedom and money, but they are stealing Palestinian happiness!

Don't let actual facts interfere with Juan Cole's fevered hallucinations.

The number of deaths per million from COVID-19 for the Palestinian territories is 1004 per million. For Israel, it is higher - 1117 per million. So much for that theory.

When the entire Palestinian territories were under direct Israeli rule from 1967-2000, Palestinian life expectancy increased from 54 to over 70. It has gone up since, too.

Cole implies that somehow Israel is fully responsible for Palestinian health. But Israeli laws do not apply to the Palestinian health sector. This is international law under the Oslo accords.

The Lancet noted in 2020:

With respect to the West Bank, the Oslo Accords state that health is under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority. As such, it is only in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority that health professionals in Israel can provide assistance to people in the West Bank. Sadly, the Palestinian Authority has decided on a general policy wherein opposing steps, which are claimed to represent so-called normalisation with Israelis, override such cooperation by forbidding Palestinian health-care personnel from working with their Israeli colleagues. We all have Palestinian associates who have privately expressed an interest in working together, but are afraid to stand out.

Other factors that could affect life expectancy (and happiness) that elude the distinguished idiot professor is that a higher percentage of West Bank Palestinians smoke than in Israel (27% vs. 20%), Arabs tend to have more obesity and diabetes, and in recent years, the Palestinian Authority has banned its people from being treated in Israeli hospitals.

The biggest proof that Cole is an idiot comes from looking at the happiness index of other Arab countries that border Israel.

While the Palestinian ranking is 122, it is higher than that of Egypt (129), Jordan (134) and Lebanon(145.) (Syria isn't ranked, but it certainly would also be lower than that of the Palestinians as well.)

Why would those people be unhappier than the Palestinians? None of the factors that Cole lists applies to them - yet they are worse off than the Palestinians that Cole says are practically enslaved by Israel! Apparently, "occupation" actually enhances happiness compared to Israel's non-occupied neighbors!

Cole's hate for Israel colors everything he writes about. It is rarely as clear as it is here.

(h/t JW)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Read all about it here!

A new anti-Israel organization that hides its agenda as "human rights" (Juan Cole, Sari Bashi, Sarah Leah Whitson...)

A new NGO has sprung up, named DAWN: Democracy for the Arab World Now. The New York Times praised it ahead of its announcement Tuesday.

Sounds reasonable. Who can be against democracy in the Arab world?

Except that the organization, founded and run by anti-Israel activists like Juan Cole, Sari Bashi and Sarah Leah Whitson, is very selective as to which non-democratic nations they want to pressure:

As a US-based organization, DAWN focuses its research and advocacy on MENA governments with close ties to the United States and the military, diplomatic, and economic support that the US provides these governments, as that is where we have the greatest responsibility.

We believe that we can have the most impact by convincing the US government and other international entities, including businesses, to uphold their human rights obligations by ending support for abusive and undemocratic governments in the region.

Oh. So they only care about human rights in Arab nations that are allied with the US, so they can pressure the US to withhold aid and arms to those nations, while the other nations can go ahead and deny human rights all they want.

Specifically, the nations that are funded by Iran are off limits to this group.

So, what is the desired effect of DAWN's advocacy? It is to create a Middle East that is dominated by Iran!

That sounds like a human rights paradise! I mean, human rights in Syria and Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon and Iraq and under Houthi rule in Yemen is the envy of other Arabs!

And by sheer coincidence, the Arab nations in DAWN's crosshairs are also those that are somewhat allied with Israel. Imagine that.

It is no surprise that DAWN associates itself with the late Jamal Khashoggi, who also was feted as a pro-democracy activist when in fact he supported the violent Muslim Brotherhood brand of Islamism and Hamas terror.

These people will insist that they care about human rights, but it doesn't take much to see that their agenda is quite the opposite.

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The Flood Libel returns - with a new twist

From Middle East Monitor:

Israel yesterday opened one of the gates of its rainwater stores east of Gaza, allowing rainwater to flood large swathes of Palestinian land, Ma’an reported.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement that the water drowned “hundreds of dunams of agricultural lands and damaged barley and wheat crops.”

According to the statement, the water storage area was located in the east of Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in the east of Gaza city.

This absurd accusation was popular a few years ago. In 2015 AFP even published the accusations. Juan Cole and HRW's Sarah Leah Whitson doubled down. But when the truth was pointed out, AFP didn't just issue a correction, but it published a full debunking of the libel and made an accompanying video showing it was a complete lie.

The accusation of Israel opening floodgates has since died down - until now.

(The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture referred to is the Hamas version, not the PA version. )

But then Middle East Monitor goes even further

Israel builds a number of reservoirs to stop rainwater from running through the Gaza valleys in winter. These prevent Palestinians in the enclave from storing rainwater to irrigate their crops and to fill underground wells.

Israel builds reservoirs in the desert just to deprive Palestinians of rainwater??

Just more lies about Israel being reported and retweeted by the usual crowd of Israel haters.

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Liar academic Juan Cole really upset at Jeffrey Goldberg for pointing out facts about Jews

Juan Cole, the twelfth rate academic whom I have shown to be a tendentious liar many, many times, is very upset at Jeffrey Goldberg:

Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss, the most lucid and informed voice on the American Jewish left doing journalism critical of right wing Zionism, reports on remarks of The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at a Jewish Community Center forum in Manhattan.

In Weiss’s telling, Goldberg argued to his audience that Israelis are like the Seminole indigenous people of Florida, and the Palestinians are “the cowboys.”

This framing of the issue is completely ahistorical and frankly ignorant, and is offensive on all sides.

It's worth reading the entire section that Weiss quoted from Goldberg, because it is quite accurate, which is why it bothers the serial liar Cole.

Many Palestinian leaders understand the conflict not as the conflict between the cowboys– the Jews– and the Indians– the Palestinians.

But the Jews are the Indians, and the Arabs, the Palestinians, the cowboys, in the following sense. What happened in the Middle East– this is not a political commentary about what should actually be done leading to a fair and equitable solution to the challenge here– but what happened here is the equivalent of the Seminoles sitting in Oklahoma or wherever they are today, scattered around the United States– Seminoles coming together and deciding that they’re going back to Florida. And going back in such numbers and telling the whites and blacks and Hispanics of Florida, Oh by the way, we’re home and we’d like a state, and we’d like to take over Florida.

The people of Florida would probably say to them, you haven’t been here in 200 years. This isn’t your home. And the Seminoles would say, Actually, it is our home. This is where our people are buried. This is the center of our religion, this is where we were expelled from.

That [discussion] doesn’t happen; and people need to understand that – what’s happened is, it’s really interesting from an analytical perspective. As Israel has become more and more powerful as a country, and every year it becomes more powerful, it becomes bigger, it becomes more militarily powerful, economically powerful, it’s lost more and more control of its own narrative. The narrative is of an indigenous people coming home to its homeland and to some degree, to a large degree, to some degree, willing to share that homeland or at least parts of that homeland with the people who moved in after. Right? But they lost total control of that narrative, because the people who were opposed to Israel’s existence are very very powerful and clever narrators as well.

In order to understand what’s going on historically you need to understand history…

It is completely natural that the people of Florida would say to the Seminoles who are walking back 200 years after the Trail of Tears, coming back to Florida, What the hell– what do you mean? You don’t live here, your father wasn’t here, your grandfather, your great grandmother, nobody was here, you can’t claim this as your own, but that’s because we don’t really understand and privilege historical memory, among other things.

Cole can't handle the truth, so he sputters. The next sentence in his article is that "Goldberg apparently can’t bring himself to say the word 'Palestinian,' as though all Arabic-speakers are indistinguishable." As you can see above, Goldberg used the word Palestinian and didn't use the word Arab. Cole apparently knows that his brain-dead followers won't bother clicking on the link that proves he cannot help making things up.

Cole then goes on an extended pseudo-history of Jews with cherry picked (and possibly made up) facts where he strenuously tries to say that Jews aren't from Palestine - he doesn't seem to subscribe to the Khazar myth but something close - and that Jews hardly ever controlled Palestine, and that Jews weren't interested in living there anyway.

As an example:

The Crusaders killed or expelled most remaining Jewish populations. From about 1100 until the early twentieth century there were virtually no Jews in Palestine. Oh, there were a handful here and there– a few Kabbalist mystics at Safad, retirees in Jerusalem. But I wrote a book about Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Middle East and the French report that they only found 3,000 Jews in geographic Palestine in 1799.

That's an interesting and counterfactual view. Jews were the majority in Palestine until the Muslim invasion - yes, the Arabs were colonialists, even though Cole falsely claims that most Palestinians have been there for millennia. (Research shows that the only truly indigenous Palestinians are the Christian community, and most of them were originally Jews.)

Since the Muslim invasion, the Jews that lived there went through an astonishing number of massacres and expulsions from both Christians and Muslims. Yet through it all, they kept coming back. Dozens of major rabbis kept immigrating with their students, often to be slaughtered again (with a few major earthquakes that also killed hundreds.)

This Wikipedia article fills in the gaping historic holes that Cole doesn't want you to know. The overwhelming conclusion is that Jews were always spiritually tied to their land despite it having very few ways of supporting them. This is the exact opposite to what Cole wants you to believe.

What about the 3000 Jews that Cole says he found out about? Well, his book on Napoleon says it - without a citation.

However, it was estimated that there were 4000-6000 Jews in Jerusalem alone in 1815, only 16 years later. This doesn't count Jews in Hebron, Safed, or Tiberias. Perhaps the French person Cole refers to, whoever that is, isn't so trustworthy.

Cole continues to lie:

The European Jews were brought to Palestine by British imperial policy during the early twentieth century heyday of colonialism, and by the rise of Fascism in Europe that drove out or killed millions of Jews. Because of the complications of the Holocaust, Jewish migration into Palestine is not exactly like the voluntary settler=colonialism of the Pieds Noire in Algeria,

Cole, the self described expert, apparently has never heard of the Perushim, the First Aliyah, the Second Aliyah. He thinks that somehow the British brought the Jews to Palestine, even though practically none of those were from Britain. He pretends that most Jews came to Palestine post-Holocaust not because they wanted to but that they were forced to. As someone who has looked up the Holocaust archives for my parents and relatives, I can tell him that the refugees filled out forms where they were offered where they would like to emigrate to. My parents chose America, they weren't forced to go to Palestine; one of my uncles and his mother chose Palestine.

In other words, Cole is a liar. Nothing new about that.

And by denying Jewish history including how fundamental Israel has always been to Jews and Judaism, Cole is proving that he is dabbling in antisemitism as well.

(h/t Dan, who reads Cole so I don't have to)

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Absurd article posted by fake academic Juan Cole blames Israel for "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinian Christians

The Hamas-supporting Middle East Monitor (MEMO) site has an article by the always ridiculous Ramzy Baroud, claiming that Israel is engaging in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinian Christians.

After quoting lots of statistics on the disappearance of Christians and blaming Israel, not Muslims or the PA, the article brings its only piece of "evidence:"

A study conducted by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in December 2017, interviewed nearly 1,000 Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. One of the main goals of the research was to understand the reason behind the depleting Christian population in Palestine.
The study concluded that “the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians,” who are finding themselves in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves”.

There are three problems with this study.

One is that it is biased against Israel. One of the authors, Bernard Sabella, was at the time also a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. There is no way that this study would look objectively at Muslim persecution of Christians, well documented not only in the territories but also throughout the Middle East.

And when Christians think that the survey is associated with the government, they are unlikely to say anything that might upset the government.

Two is that in order to prove Israeli "ethnic cleansing" of Christians, it would mean that Israel is somehow targeting Christians more than Muslims. Yet this same study showed that Palestinian Muslims shared nearly the exact same level of fear as well as optimism as the Christians surveyed.

If they suffer equally, and the Muslims aren't persecuting the Christians, then why are only the Christians leaving and not nearly as many Muslims?

The third issue is methodological. If one wants to understand why Christians are fleeing the PA-controlled areas, you don't ask the people who are still there - you ask the people who left!

To be sure, part of the reason more Christians leave than Muslims because Christians were more middle class and had more economic opportunity to leave, as well as welcoming communities to go to where there are already many established Palestinian Christians, in the US and South America. But it is just as certain that there has been many cases of reported persecution of Christians by Muslims.

The most hilarious part of this absurd article is that after invoking this ridiculous report as the be all and end all on proof of Israeli persecution of Christians, it adds:

Unfounded claims that Palestinian Christians are leaving because of religious tensions between them and their Muslim brethren are, therefore, irrelevant.

I've published many articles over the past fifteen years documenting how Muslims have been attacking Christians in the West Bank and Gaza, forcing the Christians to look to live elsewhere. This study does not refute that at all.

Another problem with the article itself is that if Israel wants to persecute Christians, why is the Christian population in Israel itself steady and growing?

It is no surprise that MEMO publishes this garbage. Interestingly, eleventh-rate professor Juan Cole was so enchanted by this piece of bad reporting that he copied the entire thing to his blog.

(h/t Dan)

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08/22 Links Pt1: Blood money -The PA has paid 2,692,500 shekels to terrorists who murdered 23 people

From Ian:

PMW: Blood money -The PA has paid 2,692,500 shekels to terrorists who murdered 23 people

16 years ago tonight, the 22nd of the Hebrew month of Av, 23 Jews were murdered in a suicide bombing while traveling on a bus in Jerusalem's Beit Yisroel neighborhood. Those murdered included 7 children. There were six terrorists directly involved in the attack, including the suicide bomber, two terrorists killed in an attempt to arrest them and three terrorists who are still in prison.

According to the calculations of Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority has paid the imprisoned terrorists and the families of the dead terrorists, as payment for the murderous attack, a cumulative sum of 2,692,500 shekels ($764,482).

One of the more dominant terrorists who planned the attack was Majdi Za'atri who was sentenced to 23 consecutive life sentences and an additional 50 years. He alone, through June 2019, has been paid by the PA 706,800 shekels ($188,996).

Two other terrorist arrested at the same time have been paid the same amount. Accordingly, since the arrest of the three terrorists in August 2003, the PA has paid them, to date, a total of 2,142,300 shekels ($608,263).

Confronting UNRWA education antisemitism at the UN

The timing of the Palestinian Authority being called to task for antisemitism in its textbooks by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination coincides with the UNRWA mandate coming under debate for renewal every five years, since 1949.

This year, for the first time, there will be no automatic renewal.

What is the connection between the PA textbooks and UNRWA?

I personally interviewed Dr. Na’im Abu Hummus, who was then Palestinian education minister, at his office on August 1, 2000, the very day the first textbooks published by the PA curriculum were provided to UNRWA.

In that interview, Al-Hummus explained that the PA had contracted with UNRWA to function as the exclusive supplier of schoolbooks for all UNRWA schools in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem.

That day, the PA provided the Center for Near East Policy Research (CFNEPR) with its first 80 school books, and the center has over the last 19 years received and examined all 365 school books which the PA has supplied to UNRWA.

Conclusions? The CFNEPR has found that PA textbooks used by UNRWA have been indoctrinating virulent antisemitism into the hearts and minds of refugees from the 1948 War of Independence and their descendants.

Significance? UNRWA is responsible for the education of 321,000 students in 370 schools.

UN agency for Palestinians is too corrupt to save

The United Nations General Assembly renews UNRWA’s mandate every three years and is expected to rubber-stamp its extension this November. Perhaps the assembly would reconsider if UNRWA’s top donors — the European Union, Germany, Britain, and Saudi Arabia — made clear that their patience is at an end.

Instead, UNRWA donors should call on the UN to treat Palestinian refugees like all other refugees in the world and address their needs through the UNHCR, which is less prone to corruption, though still not immune. The provision of services to Palestinians in need would continue or even improve. The U.S. could incentivize the proposed reform by offering to restore most or all of its $360 million annual funding if the UNHCR takes charge.

Additionally, as President Trump’s special envoy Jason Greenblatt suggested, nearby countries hosting Palestinians should assume many of UNRWA’s responsibilities — with donor support — so that these populations can finally start building lives outside the camps.

Corruption within a self-serving and self-preserving bureaucracy is entirely predictable. UNRWA has become a vestigial organ, no longer serving its purpose of helping actual refugees. Eliminating a bloated, bureaucratic UNRWA and redirecting its work towards more efficient bodies determined to solve the problem will ultimately serve all interested parties. It would cause some pain, but it is better than condemning another generation of Palestinians to grow up in the camps, where they learn to blame Israel for their suffering.

Ninth-rate academic Juan Cole calls a student going to university in Israel a "BDS WIn"

I haven't looked at idiot academic Juan Cole for a while, but here's his blog headline for a Ma'an story:

Ma'an's headline also called it a "BDS victory" but Cole rewrote it - and he still considers this a "win" for BDS even though the BDS movement is explicitly against students coming to Israel to study.

To think that Cole still tries to pass himself off as a Middle East expert....

(h/t Dan)

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Good news! Juan Cole says Iran is peaceful as a pussycat!

Every once in a while someone sends me a link to a post by ninth-rate academic Juan Cole, and I can't resist showing what a shill for Iran he is.

Here's today's, where he pretends to debunk Netanyahus' warningd of Iran using Syria and Lebanon as springboards to attack Israel. :

First of all, Iran has not vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map. Rather, Iran has a no first strike policy that has been repeatedly underlined by Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani.

Second of all, Iran has not turned Damascus into a fortress or Syria into an army base. Iran sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers to Syria to train and advise the Syrian Arab Army. They are the equivalent of special ops. It is likely that there aren’t more than a couple of thousand Iranian military personnel in the country. Iranian officers have died at such a rate that they must have been in the field leading Hizbullah and Iraqi Shiite militias rather than only in the barracks doing training. There are estimated to have been as few as 500 Iranian personnel killed in Syria despite the big battles at places like Aleppo, and so there just can’t be very many Iranian troops fighting there.

Only 500 Iranian killed in Syria! What more proof do you need that Iran isn't fighting in Syria?

Except that Cole is lying. Iranian officials themselves admitted that over 1000 Iranian soldiers had been killed in Syria as of last November.

And Cole conveniently forgets to include Iran's proxy army Hezbollah, which is wholly under Iranian control. Over 1000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria as well. And that's what they admit, the number may be much higher.

According to some reports Iran controls more soldiers (although most not Iranian) than Syria does in Syria - some 70,000 troops that report to Iran.

Cole knows this, but his blog isn't about truth, but propaganda. I wonder if Iran pays him as well.

He goes on:

This tiny rag tag force helped make a difference for the al-Assad regime in fighting Sunni rebels who have only light to medium weaponry. But it isn’t the kind of force that offers a significant threat, or a threat at all, to Israel.

Israel isn't concerned about the current army, but Iran's ability to use Syria as a launching pad for rockets and missiles - like Lebanon has become.

Third, Iran is very unlikely to be building missile factories in Syria and Lebanon, and Netanyahu just asserts these things rather than giving any evidence for them. He is a one man walking fake news. Israel has several hundred atomic bombs and the means to deliver them, and Iran is not so crazy as to send a missile against Israel.

Likewise, Hizbullah, of which Netanyahu is so afraid, is just a regional militia. It has no armor to speak of and no air force.
The only reason for Netanyahu to be afraid of Hizbullah is if he wanted to invade Lebanon and/or Syria. It would put up a good guerrilla defense, as in 2006. But it isn’t capable of offensive action against the Israeli army, the best-equipped military in the Middle East.

Multiple sources, Arab and French, have discussed two of Iran's underground missile manufacturing plants in Lebanon. Oops.

Iran has sent thousands of missiles into Israel. They just used their proxies in Iran and Gaza so Israel wouldn't retaliate against them directly.

And, why worry about 100,000 accurate rockets that are aimed at Israeli chemical and nuclear facilities, according to Hassan Nasrallah himself.There is no real threat from Hezbollah because they don't have an air force. What possible damage can 100,000 rockets do?

Juan Cole says not to be concerned! And he's like, a professor! And he knows Farsi! So he must be truthful, right?

Cole knows every single thing I have written here. He doesn't want his fans to know those facts, though. His twisting of facts and deception is clear to anyone who bothers to look.

But I haven't heard anyone important quoting him for a couple of years, so chances are - everyone knows what a fraud he is by now. And if you don't, just look through the many posts where I proved him a liar and a fraud.

(h/t Dan)

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"Intellectual" believes that Saudi Arabia gives Israel billions of dollars a year

Seventh-rate academic Juan Cole writes that anti-Zionism cannot have anything to do with antisemitism, and he has five "intellectuals" to prove it, quoting an article in TeleSUR.

One of the towering examples of intellect is David Palumbo-Liu, who I've shown can get an astonishing number of facts wrong in a single paragraph.

On that very same day, that towering intellectual Palumbo-Liu tweeted this:

Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance? https://t.co/1W8cLIpOxG via @truthout
— David Palumbo-Liu (@palumboliu) May 9, 2016

The article he links to, at conspiracy-theory hotbed TruthOut, says this:

According to a source briefed by US intelligence analysts, the Saudis have given Israel at least $16 billion over the past 2 ½ years, funneling the money through a third-country Arab state and into an Israeli "development" account in Europe to help finance infrastructure inside Israel. The source first called the account "a Netanyahu slush fund," but later refined that characterization, saying the money was used for public projects such as building settlements in the West Bank.

So the "intellectual" that academic Juan Cole thinks is so trustworthy believes that Saudi Arabia sends far more money to Israel and the US does - $6 billion annually - in order to build Jewish settlements (and turn the "Israel Lobby" to their advantage, of course.)

And the source is impeccable: "a source briefed by US intelligence analysts." How much more reliable can you get?

It's fun looking at how easily anti-Israel "academics" can not only lie but also believe the most absurd things, as long as it fits with their pre-existing biases of Israel being the world's most evil regime. Any pretense of academic rigor is not only missing, but actively discouraged.

It is a wonder that colleges employ these quacks.

Meanwhile, I need to ask the Saudis to send me a few hundred million, because I am very influential, as Electronic Intifada admits. As the US head of the Jewish Electronic Media Lobby, I can definitely help the Saudis achieve their political aims.

For a price.

UPDATE: Another "alternative news" site is claiming that Saudi Arabia gave $80 million to Netanyahu's re-election campaign, pretending that this was a Panama Papers revelation. Can't wait to see which intellectual giants will retweet that one.

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PA doubles down on flood libel

The PA and Hamas might disagree on everything, and insult each other regularly, but if a Hamas agency declares that Israel is opening up dams without evidence, then by Allah the PA is going to believe them!

The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned on Monday Israel’s act of pumping large amounts of rainwater into the Gaza Strip, which flooded dozens of homes and caused injuries among Palestinians.

On February 21, the Israeli army opened the floodgates of a canal leading to central Gaza, which resulted in the removal of sand mounds along the border with Israel, said Gaza's Civil Defense Directorate said in a statement.

Civil Defense said about 50 homes sank in the floods, while a number of local residents in eastern Gaza areas were reported injured. There were also reports of deaths of livestock and poultry.

The ministry considered this Israeli action as ‘arbitrary’ and a continuation of Israel’s aggression against the people of Gaza, stressing that this action is a crime against humanity and in violation of all norms and standards.

It expressed surprise at the international community’s silence over this ‘crime’, demanding a prompt move to stop the Israeli siege imposed on the strip, to provide the people of Gaza with the necessary protection, and to prosecute the perpetrators at international courts.

I have a fantasy that in some back rooms at the UN, when the PLO representative starts babbling bizarre accusations to real diplomats, they just tell him to shut the hell up.

Meanwhile, the list of people who are willing to repeat the lie about Israel opening nonexistent dams grows to include fifth-rate academic Juan Cole and Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson.

In a sane world, the list of people and news organizations that repeated this lie would instantly lose all credibility. Too bad we live in an insane world.

(h/t Judge Dan)

The cultural roots of violence in the Middle East - nothing to do with "statelessness"

Yesterday I showed what an idiot Juan Cole was for claiming that "statelessness" is the driving factor behind terrorism (and, therefore, Israel becomes responsible for every terror attack against it.)

To see some real analysis, this article by a PhD candidate published in Now Lebanon highlights once again the difference between a real academic and a fraud like Cole:

The Middle East has developed its own identity-based hierarchal order through the centuries. From the Omayyad to the Ottoman Empire, political legitimacy in the region rested on Islam. Non-Muslims were tolerated in Muslim realms, but only as second class members of society – i.e. dhimmis. The first cleavage in the region’s hierarchy separated believers from non-believers, the kuffar. The second great dividing line established the dominance and superiority of Sunnis over heterodox Muslim sects, most notably Shiites, Alawites, Ismailis, and Druze. Heterodox Muslims were frequently portrayed as the “enemy within” and were repeatedly accused of collaborating with foreign invaders, whether Mongols, Crusaders, or Persians.

Frequently, heterodox sects found refuge in rugged mountainous terrains away from the direct control of Sunni imperial centers (e.g. Jebel Ansarieh for the Alawites, Jebel Amel for the Shiites, Jebel al-Dourouz for the Druze). In the relative security of their fiefdoms, they developed a strong sense of we-ness coupled with a suspicion of Sunni Islam, as well as a deep resentment of their inferior status.

The rise of modern Middle Eastern states did not upset old hierarchical orders as dominant elites paid only lip service to secularism and modernization. The rhetorical emphasis on Arab nationalism did little to transcend the sectarian cleavages of old but instead rekindled an additional line of fracture, this time separating Arabs and non-Arabs (e.g. Kurds in the Levant and Berbers in North Africa). In Iraq and Syria, the current battlefields of the region, it was better to be Muslim than Christian or Jewish, Sunni than Shiite or Alawite, and Arab rather than Kurdish. Beyond the emotional wounds stemming from inferior social status, belonging to the lower echelons of the hierarchy meant having restricted access to state services, educational opportunities, and professional advancement.

Like any other hierarchical order, the system was seen as fundamentally illegitimate by subordinate groups. Consequently, it could only be defended through violent means. From the time the British Royal Air Force was used to bomb restive Shiite tribes in southern Iraq in the 1930s to the mass slaughters of Shiites and Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s army in the early 1990s, the Sunni elite in Iraq upheld the status quo by brute force. Ruling elites hailing from the long-oppressed heterodox groups did not prove any better when military coups, or the exogenous shock of foreign invasion, allowed them to reverse the order: the Alawite-dominated regime in Syria, firmly established since 1970, was discriminatory and violent from the beginning. The same can be said about the Shiite-dominated regime of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq.

In America, when the racial hierarchy was dismantled after the triumph of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement, it was gradually replaced with an inclusive order, one that eventually allowed an African-American to become president. The tragedy of the Middle East is that each time a hierarchy has collapsed – such as when Sunnis lost power in Syria in the 1960s and in Iraq in 2003 – it was immediately reproduced, only with the previously oppressed quickly emerging as oppressors and vice-versa. Herein lay the cultural roots of the region’s continued civil wars.

Now, when a Jewish-majority state emerges in the middle of this already-existing friction between various classes of Arabs, how do you think they will think about the Jews who do not accept their second-class status with joy?

As I noted last week in my post about how different sects in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine hated each other in 1876, it was admitted that "all despised the Jews."

Anyone who pretends that Arab hate of Jews has anything to do with how Israel acts needs to explain why the Arabs hated the Jews before Israel existed. Cole, and the legions of Israel haters that he is a member of, cannot do that. So instead they spend their days and nights effectively justifying Arab antisemitism - and antisemitic murders - as if they are natural.

Despicable Juan Cole blames Jews for the boys' murders

We've looked before at sixth-rate "academic" Juan Cole before. We've shown him to be a liar a number of times. He twists statistics, and sometimes he just makes them up. He compared an Islamist dictator to Thomas Jefferson.

Once, because he was apparently so sick of how many times I showed him to be a lying piece of garbage, he even (falsely) accused me of inspiring a mass murderer.

Cole lies as easily as he breathes. And he never corrects his lies, a sure sign of someone for whom ideology trumps facts.

Now he is justifying terrorist acts and blaming the victims, all the while pretending that he isn't doing exactly that:

The kidnapping and killing of three Israeli squatter youth whose parents usurped Palestinian land has produced a paroxysm of hatred and calls for reprisals in Israel. Whoever is responsible for it, the killing of the youth was a horrid and inexcusable crime, and the heart of any parent goes out to the bereaved families.

Can there be a more backhanded "condemnation" of terror than this?

Besides the utterly disgusting implication that Jews who live in Judea and Samaria do not have the same human rights that everyone else on the planet does, and the utterly loathsome implication that most Zionists are responding to the news of the murders with vengeance rather than deep sadness, Cole appears not to know that two of the murdered boys lived in central Israel!

But why should Cole bother himself with mere facts? He has other fish to fry, and mere facts just get in the way. Cole lives in a post-factual world. He is more interested in what he calls "context."

But assuming that Palestinians were the culprits, the social and political structures fostered by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party form an essential context here. Social scientists always contextualize, an anathema to propagandists and the more glib of the journalists, who confuse it with excusing things. To put things in context is not to justify anything, it is to seek and understanding of human actions beyond the simple demonization of the Other.

Hate to break it to you, Juan, but when all of your "context" is in the same direction, against Jewish Israelis, it is just a slightly more sophisticated kind of propaganda. Don't kid yourself - there is no "social science" involved here at all. It is all propaganda. And here's proof.

The Likud has a policy of keeping the Palestinians stateless.....Since the stateless lack a state, they also lack law and order. What most struck me from my last visit to a Palestinian refugee camp was how much of a frontier situation it was. There are no police. Everyone has to fend for themselves. And it is easy for predatory gangs to form.

That is, statelessness produces small violent groups such as Islamic Jihad and perhaps the Palestinian branch of the so-called “Islamic State” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It produces them because in the absence of formal state structures, such groups thrive in the interstices of society. And it produces them because statelessness and the consequent deprivation of basic human rights produces potent grievances.

What a great social-science theory!

Except that Al Qaeda members, and ISIS members, and the members of Egyptian Salafist groups, and most of those of the PLO and Fatah before 1967, and pretty much every other terror group in history have been made up of full, card-carrying citizens of states!

Now, who else has been against the establishment of a Palestinian state? Well, the entire Arab world before 1967, for starters. Yet the Palestinian terror groups that emerged then were aimed at Israel, not at Egypt and Jordan.

Imagine that - Cole's entire thesis completely destroyed by a little "context."

Who else is forcing Palestinian Arabs to be stateless? The leaders of every Arab nation that refuses to allow Palestinians who want to become citizens from doing so. No, they prefer that they remain stateless in order to justify and foment hate against Israel.

Exactly what Juan Cole is doing in this very article.

After all, if he is so upset over Palestinian Arabs being stateless, why won't he demand that Lebanon or Syria allow people who have lived there for generations become citizens if they want to? Why doesn't he encourage the Palestinian Arabs to accept one of Israel's many peace plans put forward - which would have resulted in a Palestinian state?

No, Cole doesn't give a damn about statelessness - he only cares about slamming Israel, and all his other "facts" are being twisted and used for only that purpose.

Which is the definition of propaganda.

What kind of "social science" is it when you cherry-pick your facts to come to a predetermined conclusion? Ah, the fraudulent kind!

Hypocrite Cole is flattering himself when he calls himself a "social scientist" - I've just proven, in a few minutes, that Cole is cares nothing for facts, for social science, for context, or for anything except for propaganda.

Why Cole is still employed and occasionally quoted as if he adds any value to the world is beyond me.

(h/t Ezra)

Juan Cole remains a lying idiot

The lying, fifth rate academic Juan Cole is at it again, with a spectacularly stupid post called "Recognizing Israel as a Jewish State is like saying the US is a White State."

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is adding a fifth demand to his negotiations with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas: That the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.”

As I've noted, this is not a new demand, and it was originally created by Olmert and Livni, not Netanyahu. But, hey, Juan Cole is an "expert," right?

Now comes the straw man arguments:

For Netanyahu’s demand to make any sense, he first has to define “Jewish.” “Jewish” has a number of possible meanings. It can mean “those recognized by Talmudic law as members of the Jewish ‘race’ via maternal descent.” The latter is the legal definition of Jewishness in Israeli law itself, and for this reason we must presume that it is what Netanyahu has in mind. It can also mean “adherents of the Judaic religion,” and we can explore those implications, as well.

Of the some 6 million self-identified Jews in Israel, about 300,000 are not recognized as “Jewish” by the Chief Rabbi and there is no prospect of them being recognized as Jewish any time soon. They were allowed to immigrate to Israel because they had at least one Jewish grandparent, but if their mother was not Jewish neither are they.

So if Israel is a “Jewish” state, is it a state for these (largely Russian and Ukrainian) “non-Jewish” Jews? Many of them are Jewish by religion, but not all are. None of them are Jewish by the Talmud.

He then goes on and on with discredited genetic studies and other points to buttress his moronic point that if any Israelis aren't considered Jewish by some definition, then they are being disenfranchised. And, of course, all Israeli Arabs are disenfranchised as well.

Here's a news flash for Cole, that he must not be aware of in his years of scholarly research: Israel has defined itself as a Jewish state for 65 years now, and somehow none of these supposed showstoppers have slowed down the Jewish state one tiny bit!

According to Cole, it is simply impossible - yet here it is. Imagine that.

Here's another news flash for Cole: Judaism is more than a religion. It isn't a race. Jews are a nation/people, and have been a people for over 3000 years.

Don't trust me. The famed 14th century Arab historian and intellectual Ibn Khaldun says explicitly that Jews are a people. Jewish prayers have said the same thing since before Islam existed. The Bible says so (e.g., 1 Kings 8:16.) . Perhaps Cole has heard of that work, it's fairly famous.

It is possible to join a nation, so this isn't a racial or genetic group. It isn't purely a religious group.

Cole's entire thesis is not only invalid, but laughably absurd.

Apparently Cole subscribes to the PLO's "logic" that the Jews aren't a people, because if they are a people, that means they have rights as a people.

Oh, and Cole also seems unaware that Israel defining itself as Jewish is not at all analogous to the US defining itself as white - it is analogous to many nations defining themselves as Arab. And guess who does that?

If he wants to be morally consistent, Cole must condemn every single Arab state that defines itself as "Arab." This disenfranchises all non-Arabs who live in Arab nations. It is discriminatory, according to Cole.

But Juan Cole isn't interested in consistency. He isn't interested in morality. He is certainly not interested in the truth. His major interest appears to be to deny the Jewish people their human rights. The very idea that Jews have such rights is anathema to lying pseudo-academics like Cole who use their pretense of knowledge to deny human rights to the Jewish people.

(h/t Adam)

Juan Cole making up facts again

Here's another example of how a third-rate academic acts.

In the middle of a typical anti-Israel posting that makes the usual, tedious and idiotic arguments one would expect from Mondoweiss (NEWS FLASH: Non-citizens who do not live in Israel cannot vote in Israel! This is awful!) he throws in his famous pseudo-facts that have no basis except his own fevered imagination.

For example, Cole claims that most haredim support Netanyahu. Who knew? I would have thought UTJ/Degel HaTorah, which gained seven Knesset seats, but what do I know?

Or this gem:

It should be noted that the Israeli right wing plays dirty tricks on the Israeli left and liberals, smearing them as traitors and harassing them (many of the nearly 1 million Israelis living outside Israel were leftists unwilling to live under Likud harassment. Such treatment of these Israelis acts as a form of voter suppression.

(Yes, this academic forgot to close the parentheses.)

Many of the million Israelis outside Israel fled because of Likud harassment? You mean they didn't move abroad for economic or family reasons, but to escape the horrid police state that Bibi built?

If that's the case, then of course the Israeli right must be dead-set against allowing non-resident Israelis to vote.

Except for this:

The inability of Israelis overseas to vote is an issue for the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, which has tabled a bill to change the electoral law. "(In an) era of globalisation, when many citizens reside outside their country on the time of the election day, we must allow them to participate in the elections," the party says.

Wow, it almost sounds like Cole's ultra-right fascist party is more democratic than many European democracies!

Once again, Juan Cole is proven to just make things up.

You know, the sort of thing that would get most academics fired.

(h/t Dan)

Juan's ProtoColes

Anti-Israel pseudo-intellectual Juan Cole wrote a typically stupid article for Arab American News last week, with some howling lies like "In fact, Israel has refused to cease colonizing and stealing Palestinian land long enough to engage in fruitful negotiations with them" (besides the absurd language, Israel did cease building for ten months, and the PLO refused to negotiate until month 10, and then only under tremendous pressure and only cosmetically. Oh, and the PLO only added this precondition around 2007.)

One of his points, however, seem to place the professor in the same company as anti-semites:

Israeli hawks represent their war of aggression as in ‘self-defense.’ But the UK Israeli chief rabbi admitted on camera that that the Gaza attack actually ‘had something to do with Iran.’

First of all, let's get the pesky facts out of the way. The Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, thought he was off the air on BBC Radio - not televised - when the presenter asked him about his opinion of the fighting in Gaza, and he answered "‘I think it’s got to do with Iran, actually" before he was told he was still on live.

Sacks is not Israeli. He was born in London. He is not a member of the Israeli government, and as far as I know he doesn't advise them nor is he privy to their own discussions.

But let us put aside Cole's lack of basic knowledge, and see what he is really trying to say.

Juan Cole apparently believes that a Chief Rabbi must be a member of the Elders of Zion, and his offhand statement - almost certainly regarding the arming of Hamas and Islamic Jihad with medium-range Iranian rockets - was not merely conjecture from thousands of miles away from Israel, but an admission of how the other Elders of the Jewish people are really thinking in our super-secret discussions.

Cole cannot distinguish between Israeli politicians - and a British Jewish religious figure.

What kind of twisted, bigoted thinking would cause someone to make such an assumption that all worldwide Jewry is speaking with the same ("hawkish") voice?

The rest of Cole's essay also betrays a bizarre, paranoid, conspiracy-theorist way of thinking. For example, he says "the military action against the people of Gaza is a diversion tactic; the real goal is Greater Israel, an assertion of Israeli sovereignty over all the territory once held by the British Mandate of Palestine." Really? Israel started a mini-war to divert the world's attention from settlements? I would have thought that Syria was doing a better job at that.

I guess those scheming Jews were bombing Gaza just to divert attention from the West Bank, and they also have secret meetings with chief rabbis who stupidly reveal their plans, which have something to do with Iran and not the settlements.

I know it is all very confusing. You need a third-rate academic like Juan Cole, who believes in conspiracy theories where Jews control everything, to explain it all.

Why should Juan Cole do research when he can just make facts up?

A classic example of how third-rate academics do their work:

One of the few contemporary examples of settler colonialism is that of Israelis in the Palestinian West Bank. The number of Palestinians who have died from infant mortality, poor health conditions and lack of sanitation, loss of farms and other property and attendant penury, and other ill effects of the Israeli expulsion of their families in 1948 and 1967 and then occupation and colonization since 1967 is surely in the hundreds of thousands at least, though this toll is seldom considered.

Cole could have taken the time to look up population statistics, infant mortality rates, population growth rates, life expectancy figures and so forth to prove his thesis. You know...research.

But actual research is so tedious and time consuming. Worse yet, it might prove the opposite to what this pseudo-intellectual wants to convey. That won't do at all! Honesty is only a virtue when it supports Dr. Cole's bias, dontcha know.

Much better for this joke of a professor to just make up fake statistics. After all, it isn't as if his cheerleading anti-Zionist fans would actually call him on making up numbers out of thin air, would they?

By the way, I once estimated that there might be as many as 1.6 million more Palestinian Arabs alive today because of Israeli policies than there would be otherwise. While my numbers are fuzzy, I at least gave sources as to where I got them from, and anyone who wants can check my work or improve on it.

Which just goes to show what a sucker I am. I should have acted like Juan Cole and just make up facts instead of actually looking up hard data. Maybe I can get tenure somewhere!

Obviously, requiring professors to do actual research before they spout their half-baked opinions as fact is way over the line. They have inherent knowledge that doesn't require something as messy as data.

Then again, this isn't the first time Cole made up facts. Nor is it the first time that he accused Zionists of indirect mass murder by making up "facts" out of thin air.

Apparently, the normal rules of scholarship can be suspended - for certain "scholars."

(h/t Dan)

Juan Cole engages in libel against me

Juan Cole, the pseudo-academic who I have proven is a liar and an idiot a number of times, last month slanderously claimed that my blog influenced mass murderer Anders Breivik:

As in Norway, where the Muslim-hating network (fostered also by hateful web sites like “Gates of Vienna,” “Elders of Ziyon,” and a host of others) deeply influenced mass murderer Anders Breivik, so in the United States the purveying of a negative image of Muslims predictably has resulted in violence.

Cole knows very well that Breivik never mentioned my blog in his manifesto, and indeed there is no evidence that he ever read my blog. Incidentally, I fisked and condemned his manifesto completely.

Juan Cole knows that people like me are a threat to him, because we expose his lies and fallacious arguments so easily while he pretends to be an intellectual. So it is not surprising that such a creature resorts to lies to try to slander me, since he is utterly incapable of actually arguing with me.

Cole also knows that this is not a hate site. I am not against Muslims and I am not against Islam as a personal religion. I have never said or implied that I support violence against Muslims. However, I am very against the hateful and supremacist political philosophy of Islamism, and I believe that Islamism must be regarded as just as evil as other supremacist political philosophies like Nazism and Communism.

Will Juan Cole apologize for this slander? Of course not. He never corrects his mistakes, even when they are proven - which is about all you need to know about his intellectual honesty.

(h/t Dan)

India police say Iran behind diplomat attack in February

From the Times of India:

Alleging that an Iranian state agency was involved in the February 13 bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat in the capital, the Delhi Police has concluded that the suspects were members of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the nation's military.

The investigation report, exclusively accessed by TOI, states that the IRGC members had discussed the plan to attack the Israeli diplomats in India and other countries with Indian journalist Syed Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi in January 2011, after Iranian scientists had been attacked allegedly by the Israelis. The cops have also learnt that Kazmi was in touch with these people for almost 10 years.

Details about the suspects have been shared with Iran through a letter rogatory. Delhi Police has sought more details of the five IRGC members, including the main bomber, Houshang Afshar Irani, who mentions his profession in Iran as a builder, Sedaghatzadeh Masoud (sales employee in a commercial company on Baharestan St, Tehran), Syed Ali Mahdiansadr (a mobile shopkeeper in Tehran), Mohammad Reza Abolghasemi (clerk in the finance department of Tehran's water authority) and Ali Akbar Norouzishayan (a retired accountant in Tehran).

According to the sources, Masoud is said to be the operational head and it was he who planned the attacks in Georgia, Bangkok and Delhi.

Apart from these five, police have also come across the role of an Iranian woman, identified as Leila Rohani, in the February 13 attack in New Delhi as well as the attacks in Bangkok and Georgia, and has sought details about her as well from Iran. Rohani had allegedly helped Iranian suspects in Bangkok attack of February 14 in getting a flat, after which she fled to Tehran.

But....Iran denied it!

And Juan Cole knows that the Indian police really don't suspect Iran! In fact, he wrote:

American media that just parrot notorious thug, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in this unlikely allegation are allowing themselves to be used for propaganda.

Can a "notorious thug" be right and an esteemed academic with a track record of unvarnished truth be wrong? Is it possible that the wonderful leaders of Iran are not telling the truth?

Too...much...cognitive...dissonance....gahh!

(h/t Yoel)

Juan Cole thinks Morsi is just like Jefferson

I really can't believe that people still take this joker seriously.

We should remember that the Thirteen Colonies that made the revolution starting in 1776 were religious societies. They had undergone the Evangelical Great Awakening, and millenarian and anti-papal movements were rife. Religious Americans fought the British for religious as well as material reasons.

...So if you are dismayed that the Muslim an-Nahda Party now dominates the Tunisian cabinet, you may as well be angry about bigotted Congregationaiists coming to power in some of the Thirteen colonies after 1776. (You could argue that the House of Representatives even today is highly religious; and the South Carolina state legislature is apparently a tailgate party for the Southern Baptist convention).

Yup, the Founding Fathers sounded just like this:

Mohamed Morsi: [in the 1920’s, the Egyptians] said: “The constitution is our Koran.” They wanted to show that the constitution is a great thing. But Imam [Hassan] Al-Banna, Allah’s mercy upon him, said to them: “No, the Koran is our constitution.”

The Koran was and will continue to be our constitution.

The Koran will continue to be our constitution.

Mohamed Morsi: The Koran is our constitution.

Crowds: The Koran is our constitution.

Mohamed Morsi: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.

Crowds: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.

Mohamed Morsi: Jihad is our path.

Crowds: Jihad is our path.

Mohamed Morsi: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.

Crowds: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.

Mohamed Morsi: Above all – Allah is our goal.

[…]

The shari’a, then the shari’a, and finally, the shari’a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari’a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari’a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts…

Rejoice and rest assured that this people will not accept a text that does not reflect the true meaning of the Islamic shari’a as a text to be implemented and as a platform. The people will not agree to anything else.

In Egypt, the MB said they wouldn't get involved in the protests - then they did.

They claimed they would not run for parliament - then they did.

They claimed they would not run for president - then they did.

But Cole believes them when they claim they will allow regular elections and listen to what the people want.

It is the "intellectual" equivalent of the mythical "law of averages," I guess.

(h/t Ron, O)

An "expert" and a real expert on Iran's anti-nuclear fatwa

A couple of days ago I noted that MEMRI stated that there was no written fatwa by Iran's Supreme Leader Khamanei forbidding nuclear weapons, and MEMRI used that as evidence that the entire fatwa was a myth.

Juan Cole, who has been trying his hardest to pretend that Iran has no nuclear weapons program despite all evidence of how they are hiding both the development of nuclear weapons and the development of rockets that could deliver them, responded, saying that

A fatwa is not like an American law that has to be published in the Congressional Record and in official law books. It is just the conclusion to which a cleric’s reasoning leads him, and which he makes known, even in a letter. In Shiite Islam, laypersons who follow a particular ayatollah are bound by his fatwas. When an ayatollah such as Khamenei delivers oral remarks in public, these have the force of a fatwa and are accepted as such by his followers. That is, Khamenei’s recent statement forbidding nuclear weapons in a speech is in fact a fatwa.

I am no expert in Shiite jurisprudence, so although this seemed strange - that a fatwa could be issued without the legal logic behind it - I don't know enough to argue.

And upon further research it looks like Cole is right in his definition. I found a fascinating paper on this very topic of Khamanei's nuclear fatwa, written by Mehdi Khalaji. Khalaji is a true expert in Shiite law, having studied Shiite theology and jurisprudence for fourteen years in the seminaries of Qom and he further studied the topic in Europe. If he and Cole disagree on the topic, there is no question that Khalaji knows infinitely more. In this case, he agrees with Cole that Khamanei's verbal nuclear fatwa is a real fatwa:

[E]ven though Ayatollah Khamenei has produced no written record on the religious prohibitions pertaining to nuclear weapons, his verbal statements on the subject are considered his religious opinions, or fatwas, and therefore binding on believers.

However, there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. Khalaji goes into great detail on how fatwas can and are regularly changed by the person who issued them, as well as about Taqiyya, which Cole downplays. He also talks about the interplay of politics and Islamic law in Iran. He describes how the Ayatollah Khomeini felt that Islamic law was not mature enough to run a modern government, and that the running of the government is actually more important that Islamic law! In Khomeini's own words:

The government can unilaterally abrogate any religious agreement made by it with the people if it believes that the agreement is against the interests of the country and Islam. The government can prevent any Islamic law—whether related to rituals or not— from being implemented if it sees its implementation as harmful to the interests of Islam.

Khalaji concludes:

In sum, since the ruling jurist has absolute authority and exclusive control in defining regime expediency, he can suspend all Islamic and constitutional laws whenever he chooses to do so. This means that laws have no independent authority; they depend entirely on the Supreme Leader’s validation. In such a system, politics never become normalized through the stable functioning of state institutions. Instead, every situation has the potential to be interpreted as extraordinary and manipulated to the liking of the Supreme Leader, possibly against the decisions of parliament, the president, and the judiciary. Thus what might be called the “politics of the extraordinary” concentrates enormous power in the hands of the ruling jurist and defines the essence of the Islamic Republic.

Supreme Leader Khamenei has stated that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam. But his recent language on the subject has become more equivocal, emphasizing only the prohibition on their use and not on their production or stockpiling. And should the needs of the Islamic Republic or the Muslim umma change, requiring the use of nuclear weapons, the Supreme Leader could just as well alter his position in response. This means that, ultimately, the Islamic Republic is unconstrained— even by religious doctrine—as it moves toward the possible production and storing of nuclear weapons.

In principle, at least, the emergence of maslaha or raison d’état in the ideology of the Islamic Republic represented a step forward in recognizing the realities of running a modern state. The principle might have been channeled toward allowing the parliament and president to establish a shared understanding of the “national interest” that could strengthen those institutions and foster nascent democratic processes. In practice, however, maslaha has become a means of freeing the political system from the hold of Islamic law, further undermining Iran’s democratic institutions and consolidating the Supreme Leader’s control over state politics, in effect laying the foundation for a clerical/military dictatorship in Iran. Iranian nuclear decisionmaking, therefore, bears the significant imprint of one man’s personality and politics—an imprint that may be unaffected by the will of other men, the decisions of other institutions, or, most ironically, the legal scruples or moral dictates of his own religion.

(Maslaha sounds a little like the Jewish concept of hora'at sha'ah, but the latter is meant to be used in only truly extraordinary and unique circumstances, while Maslaha seems to be much broader and less constricted in how it is used.)

What it boils down to is that Khamanei truly is the Supreme Leader, and he can do whatever he wants - suspend Islamic law, change his mind, lie, bypass all government institutions - if he believes that it is necessary to help run the country.

Which means that his fatwa, while apparently legitimate, is literally meaningless. There is literally nothing that binds him to even his own legal rulings. Actions are the only way that he can be judged, because he has no moral reason to keep his word.