Juan Cole Compares the "P-Word" to the "N-Word"

University of Michigan comedian Juan Cole is understandably not happy with last week’s debate debacle on the part of President Biden. However, in his post-debate “analysis” in his curiously-named blog, Informed Comment, he focuses on one minor moment in the debate when former President Trump called Biden a “bad/weak Palestinian”. In the same debate, Biden called Trump a “child” and in 2020, called him a “clown”. Most voters are not pleased with the back-and-forth insults that pose as debate, but Cole, in his usual fashion, is describing the “weak Palestinian” comment as racist. Cole asks if the “P-word” is the new “N-word”.

“It is unprecedented for someone to call a sitting US president a “Palestinian,” and the use of the term as an insult is a measure of how racist American society is.”

Cole conveniently forgets Biden’s insults to Trump in 2020-when Trump was the sitting president. In 2020, Biden called Trump a “clown” and also told him to shut up. That was unprecedented too. No matter. The point is that the “P-word” can hardly be compared to the “N- word”. The term” Palestinian” is not an ethnic slur word-no matter how unpopular pro-Palestinian protesters have made themselves in the US-especially since October 7. It is also ironic since it was the Palestinians themselves, most prominently Yassir Arafat, who adopted the designation back in the 1960s even though there has never been a nation called Palestine. During the 800 years it was under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine was just a geographic term, much like New England. If you go back to the early 20th century and used the term “Palestinian” you could have been referring to an Arab resident or a Jewish resident of the area.

“And it is ironic that someone universally despised as a genocide enabler by Palestinians should be thusly associated with them.”

As with Trump, it can be said of Joe Biden that he is many things. He is not a genocide enabler, and he certainly is not universally despised as such. He is despised by the pro-Palestinian crowd, which loves to throw out charges of Israeli genocide, which in itself, is a false narrative. In their world, and in Cole’s world, unless you march in lockstep with the Israel-haters, you are complicit in genocide. Biden, for his part, is trying to walk a thin line in the current fighting in Gaza. In other words, he has angered both sides.

Cole then goes back in history when the N-word was used with regularity even by politicians and newspapers. To draw a parallel with the current war in Gaza and compare blacks who were lynched during the Jim Crow era with the Palestinians who have been killed in the Gaza fighting is absurd. 

“Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, in authoritarian thinking, have to be kept down by violence, and may even be killed for this purpose. Some 4,000 African Americans were lynched by bigoted whites during the Jim Crow era in a standing exercise in terror.”

Today it is the Palestinians who are killed with impunity, over 40,000 of them in Gaza if you count the civilians under the rubble.

No doubt Cole accepts the 40,000 figure provided by the Gazan Health Ministry-which operates under Hamas. Whether Cole includes the actual Hamas terrorists killed by the IDF, is unclear. At any rate, I do know one thing about American history. Blacks living in the Jim Crow South were not going around murdering whites or carrying out acts of terror as Hamas has done against innocent Israeli civilians-including women and infants. The KKK was not carrying out a justified military response against black invaders or terrorists-as Israeli is doing in Gaza as they fight Hamas. Those blacks killed during the Jim Crow era were deliberately targeted as opposed to being collateral victims who died because their leaders used them as human shields-as does Hamas. The situation is much different.

But not to Professor Cole.

“But the problem of hatred of Palestinians is not limited to Israel. In the US, three Palestinian-American students in Vermont were shot down for wearing kuffiyehs and speaking Arabic. A six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was killed by a white landlord in Chicago, and his mother was wounded. In Texas at a public pool, a woman asked a Palestinian-American mother where she was from, and when the answer was Palestine, the woman tried to drown her children.”

The incidents Cole cites above, while terrible, are not representative of our country, our society, or our people. No decent American would celebrate those crimes-as so many Palestinians celebrate the deaths of Israelis.  In addition, the US-and Israel- both have effective justice systems to deal with offenses like these-unlike the Palestinians, especially in Gaza.

Finally, there is this:

“Congress is trying to pass a law forbidding the use of casualty counts by the Gaza Ministry of Health, attempting to erase an entire genocide. The Ministry of Health is staffed with professionals and its numbers have been used in the past by the US government and are even acknowledged by many Israelis.”

“That’s the same Congress that kept Black people enslaved until 1863 and that did nothing to stop Southern states from rolling back Reconstruction and denying the vote to African-Americans until 1964.”

I know nothing about this law that Cole says Congress is trying to pass. If true, it would seem unconstitutional since people in this country are free to use whatever statistics from whatever sources they please. Others can question the numbers and the sources. As stated above, the Gazan Ministry of Health is under Hamas. It is also true that many international news sources, when quoting Palestinian casualty figures from the Gazan Health Ministry, inform their readers/audiences that the numbers cannot be independently verified.

And no, Mr Cole, this is not the same Congress today that kept black people enslaved until 1863 and was disgracefully negligent in protecting the civil rights of blacks up to 1964. It bears the same name, but the people are different, and the times are different.

My suggestion to Juan Cole is this: If he is really so concerned about hate, maybe he should pay more attention to the anti-Jewish hate on his own campus, the University of Michigan. Once he opens his eyes and sees it, he can ask himself just who the primary instigators are on campus.

Here’s a hint: It’s a P-word.