09 June 2011

Dagan, Cole and gaps

In his latest piece Dagan, Ofer and Israel’s Growing Iran Credibility Gap Juan Cole, the notorious interpreter of Ayatollahs and the top authority on translation of various sticky Farsi sentences, boasts about the position on Iran he shares with Meir Dagan, our retired chief of Mossad:

In other words, ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s positions on Israel and Iran and the flakiness of Netanyahu in these regards are the same as those of Juan Cole, who has been pilloried by the American Likud for taking them.
In the same article, he says:
Iran probably wants what is called ‘nuclear latency,’ the ability to build a bomb in short order, as deterrence against attack, but probably does not want an actual bomb, which it considers contrary to Islamic law
I am not going into the list of fallacies in this quote (such as short order nuke), but still one question remains: does professor Cole share this opinion with Dagan too?

And, since we are on the subject of Iran, nukes and Juan Cole, I must mention this news (from The Guardian, to avoid accusation of using Zionist sources):
Any mention of an Iranian nuclear weapon is taboo in the Islamic Republic, which insists that its nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful, civil purposes. So it is remarkable, to say the least, that an article has appeared on the Gerdab website, run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, anticipating the day after Iran's first test of a nuclear warhead.
The valiant Revolutionary Guards gleefully anticipate responses of all major MSM outfits. That is, almost all, forgetting their cheerleader, Mr. Cole. Do you want to guess how will professor Cole re-interpret a sentence like: "Iran detonated nuclear bomb".

If not, your curiosity index is at its rock bottom...

4 comments:

Dick Stanley said...

A nuke is contrary to Islamic law? How so? They don't seem to mind swords which are, after all, also "area weapons" if you swing them around. But, then, Cole is a big deal "expert" and I' not.

On the other hand, what I read of Dagan's remarks didn't include the notion that the Iranians are not building nukes, only that any bombing of the nuke sites would only delay, not end, the development of them, which makes sense. The bombing idea has always been flaky.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Right on all points.

Yitzchak Goodman said...

Iranian officials sometimes say nuclear weapons are against Islam in their official statements. Cole would take that at face-value.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Yep, Cole would, for sure.