...The prospect of Mr. Cole joining the Yale faculty is disturbing for many reasons. His "scholarship" in this area consists entirely of crude polemics, and his outlook is colored by a conspiratorial view of history. Mr. Cole has used his modicum of fame not to participate in the realm of respectable scholarly debate but to express his deep and abiding hatred of Israel and to opine about the influence of a Zionist cabal on American foreign policy.

Mr. Cole's most frequent public statements and writing - many of which appear on his blog, Informed Comment - have deviated considerably from his areas of expertise. He rarely misses an opportunity to inveigh against Israel. If it were up to Mr. Cole, the country wouldn't exist at all. It would have been preferable, he claims, for the British to have accepted Jewish refugees "rather than saddling a small, poor peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make the place their own." Today's Israel, Mr. Cole contends, is "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East" and the primary instigator of the terrorist threat against America.

According to Mr. Cole, American Jews both inside and out of government are primarily loyal to Israel and subvert American interests for those of the Jewish State. He believes that American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American pro-Israel lobby group that is one of the targets of the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, has Congress in its back pocket. "This level of the control of congress by what is essentially the agent of a foreign government has deeply distorted US foreign policy and made the US a dishonest broker." He has written that "pro-Likud intellectuals" "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel-Aviv." Mr. Cole has even hypothesized that "powerful Likudniks inside the US government are deliberately engineering a diplomatic rift in NATO, so as to ensure that Paris and Moscow cannot position themselves to influence Washington's position (usually supine) toward Sharon's excesses." According to Cole, these same Likudniks launched the war in Iraq in order to "defang" the country "as a favor to Ariel Sharon." In a 2004 article entitled "Dual Loyalties," Mr. Cole wrote, "I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party."

Only last month, Mr. Cole made headlines for effusively praising the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. The paper essentially charges Jewish government employees with loyalty to Israel over America; it accuses Jews of stifling public dialogue through control of the press, think tanks, and government; and it alleges that Jews dupe non-Jews into "fighting, dying ... and paying" for causes that are "not in the American national interest."...