On April 24, Wall Street Journal opinion columnist John Fund penned an attack on University of Michigan professor Juan Cole. The column was an attempt to block Cole’s appointment to a Yale University professorship, and it included at least one outright lie. Fund has not responded to repeated requests from Cole to retract the lie.

The Journal’s editorial pages and their online offshoot, Opinion Journal, are notoriously a haven for smear artists and intellectually defective or dishonest editorialists. Fund is among the more prominent in both categories.

Fund claims that Cole, a prolific blogger on the subject of Iraq, called Israel “the most dangerous regime in the Middle East.” Cole says that “I did say that then-Israeli policies of assassinating people like Sheikh Yassin were dangerous to US interests in the Middle East,” but he never made the statement Fund attributes to him. Fund also smeared Cole as an anti-Semite, based on Cole’s opposition to Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Likud Party and its supporters in the US government.

This isn’t the first time Fund has printed falsehoods and failed to retract them. Media Matters notes an incident in which Fund claimed in a print editorial that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson had requested a meeting with the head of the Minutemen, the extremist anti-immigrant organization conducting border patrols in New Mexico and elsewhere. When Richardson disputed the allegation, the Journal republished the column online with the offending passage removed, but not retracted. Fund then repeated it in a subsequent column, and has yet to retract it.

Fund also takes Cole to task for supporting the Mearsheimer-Walt paper decrying the influence over Congress enjoyed by pro-Likud lobbies such as AIPAC, claiming that Cole is the only prominent US academic supporting the paper’s conclusions. That’s not true, but even if it were it’s not a measure of anti-Semitism: you don’t have to look farther than the pages of Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, to prove the stupidity of that claim. If Cole is anti-Semitic on that score, so are the liberal Jews at Ha’aretz. (Disclosure: I’m a leftist Jew who didn’t think highly of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper.)

An honest writer, and one with the modicum of courage required to say “Oops,” would retract his smears and lies. Fund appears to possess neither honesty or that sliver of courage. That isn’t surprising, given his history, but it’s a shame. What’s even more of a shame is that in smearing Cole, Fund has chosen a target who is doing more to promote US interests — and, ironically, Israel’s — in the Middle East than Fund could, or would, ever dream of doing.

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