Kramer vs. Cole

As a follow-up to Julian's entry on MEMRI and its threat to begin a libel suit against Middle East scholar-blogger Juan Cole, you might want to go to the site of another schogger, Martin Kramer, who recalls that Cole threatened legal action against Kramer and his colleague Daniel Pipes for having created an allegedly threatening "dossier" on him on the Campus Watch website (Kramer was not involved with Campus Watch).

I've published Cole in the past and am on friendly email terms with Kramer, so I have no dog in this fight, but I do agree with Kramer (with reservations about his views of Cole, whose website I nevertheless find overrated) when he writes:

MEMRI's president, Yigal Carmon, shouldn't have threatened legal action–in part because it makes too much of Cole, who's famously prone to fact-free tantrums, and whose weblog is an embarrassment of errors. But in the same measure, Juan Cole shouldn't have threatened action two years ago against Daniel Pipes and myself. I don't like the culture of litigation, where people deal with criticism by legal intimidation instead of arguments.