I had read this piece by Christopher Hitchens the other day but failed to link to it due to illness and overwork. (I've come down with a nasty cold and worked a minimum of 10.5 hours each of the last three days. At this point I was kinda hoping that I had contracted the Black Death.)

Hitchens slashes into University of Michigan professor The Unctuous Juan Cole for acting as a dishonest apologist for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinnerjacket.

However, words and details and nuances do matter in all this, so I was not surprised to see professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map.

I ripped into Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell a couple of weeks back when he characterized Iran as a "trumped-up" threat. Cole is even worse, as Hitchens points out.

You can read Cole's whiny non-response response here. Beware of scrolling down too far -- Unctuous Cole attempts to bolster his "argument" by showing some gruesome pictures of military personnel and civilians in Iraq. After you've read Cole's lame non-rebuttal rebuttal, check out Iowahawk's satirical take. [via Patterico.]

What's really disappointing in all of this -- both Mitchell and Unctuous Cole -- is that the Bush Derangement Syndrome is preventing two possibly intelligent men (I wouldn't bet on it) from recognizing that when the president of a terrorist supporting nation says that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, that maybe, just maybe he does want to wipe Israel off the map. Oh, and he's trying to get nuclear weapons too.

I mean, if said I was going to take my new shotgun (nope, haven't bought it yet) and spill some of Juan Cole's blood -- would he take that as a threat? I mean, maybe I'm going to get some Heinz ketchup and put it in a bucket labeled "Juan Cole's blood" and dump it on the ground outside his faculty office. Unctuous Cole will probably be reporting me to the FBI, because my "threat" is more credible to him than that of Iran.

Once again, how whacked out does your worldview have to be to really believe that "wiping Israel off the map" doesn't really mean, oh, killing a lot of Jews.