Juan Some, Lose Some

Over at Uninformed Comment, Juan Cole has taken on the abstruse matter of Jerusalem in ancient Assyrian texts. Cole's nemesis, Tony Badran of Across the Bay, who knows the topic rather better than Cole, knocks the good professor's carton mortarboard off with a long and learned commentary correcting his myriad errors.

And just to show that boo-boos come in bunches, Cole also wrote: "An outspoken but generally anti-Shiite Bahrain blog by a Sunni is Mahmood's Den." However, Mahmood (who apparently had not heard of Cole's previous uncorroborated accusations against Iraq the Model) protested that he was a Shiite and that "these statements (judgments) struck me as odd and [I] would like to know from the professor (and you if you would) what in this blog suggested that I am anti-Shi'ite and that I am a Sunni?"

And what did Cole do? He furtively corrected the entry without even bothering to issue an apology or to make clear that his original post was wrong. Ah, the things a PhD teaches you.