Welcome to the second and final part of this scholarly exposition. Having stripped Juan Cole’s article of its initial colonial and total-war fallacies in Part 1, we now turn our attention to the remaining half of his text.
In this section, Cole attempts to pull off an academic sleight of hand. To neutralize the unique, text-driven reality of global Islamist militancy, he employs a strategy of aggressive blame-shifting—rapidly targeting Zionists, Hindus, and Buddhists to construct a narrative of universal religious equivalence. He then concludes his piece by hiding behind standard secular humanist clichés about ‘universal human nature’ and weaponizing highly compromised crime data from closed Islamic autocracies.
I urge you to maintain your close attention. As we dissect Cole’s remaining paragraphs line-by-line, we will expose how he deliberately strips local ethnic conflicts of their political contexts, ignores the continuous, 1,400-year reality of Islamic ideological genocides, and ultimately falls into a massive logical contradiction that completely invalidates his entire article. Let us continue the refutation.
SECTION 4: (Refuting Paragraph 6)
Juan Cole states:
“Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then Marxist), European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people… Russia when it brutally conquered and ruled the Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).”
The Refutation:
Cole explicitly attempts to link the slaughter of 1.5 million Central Asians to “Eastern Orthodox Christianity.” This is a blatant distortion of the historical timeline. The massive casualties and forced deportations in Central Asia between 1916 and 1930 peaked under the Soviet Union—an explicitly atheistic, anti-theistic regime that actively demolished Christian churches and executed Orthodox priests.
Before the Soviets, the Tsarist Russian expansions into the Caucasus were driven by secular Great Power geopolitics (the “Great Game” against the British Empire) and defensive reactions against centuries of previous Mongol-Tatar and Ottoman-backed raids. The Tsarist state did not launch these wars as Christian crusades; in fact, Tsarist administrators legally preserved Islamic courts and customs in Central Asia to maintain civil order and secure tax revenues.
According to Seymour Becker (Ph.D. from Harvard University, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University), said:
“Russia’s expansion into Central Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was propelled by classic Great Power geopolitics—specifically the desire to secure strategic borders against the British Empire and exploit new markets. The Tsarist state pursued a policy of religious non-interference, leaving Islamic courts and customs entirely intact to maintain civil order.”
Source: Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924. Routledge, 2004, p. 42.
Also Orlando Figes (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London),
“The devastating violence and deportations witnessed in Central Asia during the late imperial and early Soviet periods were escalated by the Bolsheviks’ militant atheism. The state sought to violently eradicate Islam, close mosques, and forcibly collectivize pastoral nomads under a secular Marxist-Leninist vision of modernization.”
Source: Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924. Penguin Books, 1998, p. 732.
Richard Pipes (Ph.D. from Harvard University, former Director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center)
“The Russian conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia was not motivated by a Christian desire to proselytize or destroy Muslims, but by centuries of defensive reactions against previous Mongol-Tatar conquests and ongoing raids by local khanates. It was an exercise in absolute state sovereignty, not religious warfare.”
Source: Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923. Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 81.
Cole tries to frame Tsarist expansion as a religious crusade against Muslims. As Seymour Becker notes, Tsarist Russia purposely left Islamic legal frameworks intact because they didn’t care about conversions—they cared about taxes and blocking the British Empire. The true mass violence Cole references between 1916 and 1930 peaked under the Soviet Union, an explicitly atheistic regime that slaughtered Central Asians to advance secular Marxism, not Eastern Orthodoxy
SECTION 5:
(Refuting Paragraph 11)
Juan Cole states:
“As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?”
The Refutation:
Cole’s comparison between the Taliban and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is his most dishonest false equivalence. The Taliban operates using mainstream, orthodox Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia) and classical interpretations of military Jihad derived directly from foundational Islamic texts (Quran and Hadith).
Conversely, Joseph Kony’s LRA is an isolated, syncretic cult based primarily on traditional Acholi spirit possession, witchcraft, and pagan mysticism. The LRA does not preach the Christian gospel; rather, Kony claims to be possessed by pagan spirits and has spent decades systematically massacring orthodox African Christians and executing Christian pastors who reject his madness. No Christian denomination on earth accepts the LRA as Christian. Blaming Christian missionaries for Kony is equivalent to blaming a doctor for a virus.
According to Tim Allen (Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Professor of Development Anthropology at the London School of Economics) says
“The Lord’s Resistance Army cannot be understood as a Christian organization. It is an idiosyncratic, syncretic cult that blends traditional Acholi spirit-medium possession, indigenous witchcraft, and military opportunism with highly selective, distorted biblical references. Its core practices are utterly antithetical to orthodox Christian theology.”
Source: Allen, Tim. Trial Justice: The Lord’s Resistance Army and the International Criminal Court. Zed Books, 2006, p. 48.
Another scholar, Gérard Prunier (Ph.D. from the University of Paris, preeminent historian of African conflicts)
“Joseph Kony’s ideology is a bizarre manifestation of regional ethno-nationalism and spiritualism. Kony claims to be possessed by pagan spirits and has frequently targeted orthodox Christian clergy and institutions for destruction in northern Uganda, demonstrating that the LRA operates completely outside the boundaries of any recognized Christian church.”
Source: Prunier, Gérard. From Genocide to Continental War: The ‘Congolese’ Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2009, p. 113.
Also is Bernard Lewis (Ph.D. from the University of London, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University)
“Unlike irregular African syncretic cults, Islamist militant groups like the Taliban derive their operational frameworks directly from orthodox historical interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia), classic concepts of military Jihad, and scriptural precedents found within the Hadith and Quranic texts.”
Source: Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Modern Library, 2003, p. 29.
Cole’s comparison between the Taliban and the LRA is a massive false equivalence. The Taliban draws directly from historic, standard text-based Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia) taught in mainstream madrasas. Joseph Kony’s LRA, conversely, is a syncretic cult based on traditional spirit possession and witchcraft that routinely massacres orthodox African Christians and executes Christian pastors. No recognized Christian denomination has ever accepted the LRA as Christian, making Cole’s attempt to blame Christian missionaries completely dishonest.
SECTION 6:
Juan Cole states:
“Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.”
The Refutation
I called this – The Homicide Illusion. It is because, Cole argues that Muslims are inherently less violent because domestic “murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.”
Cole uses a classic statistical deception. He mistakes a lack of reliable, transparent democratic reporting for a lack of actual violence. Most of the nations in the Arab and Islamic world operate under strict, autocratic police states or heavily restricted legal systems. These governments systematically underreport domestic homicides and exclude large categories of violent deaths from the official statistics they send to international bodies.
For instance, thousands of “honor killings” of women, extrajudicial state executions, deaths from forced marriages, and violent tribal clashes are hidden or classified as “accidents” and “suicides” under local legal codes that protect the perpetrators. Comparing these highly censored, state-controlled figures to the completely open, transparent, and stringently tracked crime data of the United States is an act of blatant academic fraud.
According to Steven Pinker (Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard)
“Crime statistics from authoritarian regimes, including much of the Arab and Islamic world, are notoriously unreliable. These states frequently underreport domestic homicides, classify honor killings as accidents or suicides, and fail to track violence in rural or tribal areas where the state lacks a monopoly on law enforcement.”
Source: Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking Books, 2011, p. 304.
Valentine M. Moghadam (Ph.D., Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University) states that:
“Statistical claims of low violent crime in the Middle East ignore structural and gendered violence. Homicides perpetrated under the guise of ‘honor killings,’ forced marriages resulting in suicide, and lethal domestic abuse are structurally hidden by legal codes that protect male perpetrators, keeping them entirely out of official homicide data.”
Source: Moghadam, Valentine M. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013, p. 82.
Paul Collier (Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government)
“Authoritarian systems may suppress low-level street crime through heavy-handed police-state tactics, but this does not equate to a peaceful society. The violence in these regions is simply centralized; it shifts from citizen-on-citizen homicide to state-sponsored political repression, arbitrary detentions, and violent crackdowns on dissent.”
Source: Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 29.
Cole uses a classic statistical trap. He mistakes a lack of reliable state data for a lack of actual violence. In many Islamic countries operating under strict police-state autocracies, street crime is suppressed by fear of state terror. Furthermore, thousands of violent deaths—such as honor killings, public executions, and tribal clashes—are never recorded as “homicides” in official government tallies sent to international bodies. Comparing these censored numbers to open, transparent, and strictly tracked US crime data is academically fraudulent.
SECTION 7:
Juan Cole states:
“As for religious terrorism, that too is universal… Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists… Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre… Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists… Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.”
The Refutation
Cole uses a classical logical fallacy known as whataboutism (tu quoque). To protect Islam from scrutiny, he rapidly lists examples of violence committed by Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. However, Cole’s academic loophole here is massive: he confuses nationalistic/ethnic conflicts with text-driven global theology.
When a Hindu nationalist or a Buddhist monk engages in violence, they are acting out of localized, political, and ethnic tribalism. They cannot point to an explicit command by the Buddha or the Hindu scriptures commanding them to launch global military campaigns to convert or execute non-Hindus or non-Buddhists.
By contrast, Islamic violence is explicitly grounded in an immutable, global textual mandate found in the Quran and Hadith. Cole shifts the blame to pretend all religions have an equal scriptural mandate for violence, which is completely false.
Koenraad Elst (Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Catholic University of Leuven, renowned Belgian scholar and indologist)
“To equate localized Hindu political reactions against centuries of Islamic aggression with the structural, textually mandated nature of Islamic Jihad is a profound academic distortion. Hindu nationalism is fundamentally a defensive, territorial reaction to foreign invasions, entirely lacking any canonical theological framework for global religious imperialism or the systematic elimination of non-believers.”
Source: Elst, Koenraad. Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Nationalism. Rupa & Co., 2001, p. 182.
Michael Jerryson (Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University)
“While Buddhist actors have undeniably engaged in severe ethnic violence, such as in Myanmar, this violence operates in direct contradiction to the foundational canonical scriptures of the Dhamma. Buddhist militancy is driven by localized ethno-nationalist anxieties regarding demographic survival, not by a scriptural doctrine of holy war or divine mandates to conquer infidels.”
Source: Jerryson, Michael. Buddhist Warfare. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 24.
David Rapoport (Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UCLA, and founding editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence)
“The ‘Religious Wave’ of modern terrorism is unique because its primary, most expansive, and structurally durable components are exclusively Islamist. Unlike localized ethnic or Zionist terror groups of the twentieth century, which had limited territorial goals, modern jihadist terrorism operates with a global, cosmic mandate rooted in foundational texts that view compromise as a sin against divine law.”
Source: Rapoport, David C. Waves of Global Terrorism: From 1879 to the Present. Columbia University Press, 2022, p. 147.
SECTION 8:
Juan Cole states:
“It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent… Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance…”
The Refutation:
In his final paragraph, Cole tries to escape his own contradictions by hiding behind a vague, secular humanist cliché: “human beings are human beings.” After spending the entire article aggressively singling out and blaming “people of Christian heritage” for 100 million deaths, he suddenly switches gears and claims that violence is just a universal human trait driven by “ambition or grievance.”This completely invalidates his entire thesis. If violence is simply a universal human flaw driven by secular ambition, then Cole has no logical basis for blaming “Christian heritage” or Christian missions for any historical atrocities.Furthermore, true scholarship proves that ideas matter. While human nature is universally flawed, the ideology a society adopts determines how that flaw is expressed. A society operating under the New Testament mandate to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44) has an internal, text-based self-correction mechanism to fight its own predatory nature. A society operating under a theological framework that rewards military conquest with divine approval does not.
David Bentley Hart (Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, preeminent philosophical theologian)
“The sentimental secular claim that all religious ideologies are equally prone to violence because ‘human nature is human nature’ is an evasion of intellectual responsibility. Ideologies possess distinct moral syntaxes. A culture formed by an ideological text that commands the turning of the cheek will possess radically different ethical trajectories and internal self-critiques than a culture formed by a text that codifies martial conquest.”
Source: Hart, David Bentley. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Yale University Press, 2009, p. 211.
Thomas Sowell (Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
“To reduce complex, text-driven imperial histories to a homogenized concept of universal human ambition is a hallmark of superficial social analysis. While the desire for power may be universal, the cultural, legal, and ideological constraints—or lack thereof—within specific societies determine whether that ambition is restrained or weaponized into systematic global conquest.”
Source: Sowell, Thomas. Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Basic Books, 1998, p. 329.
Mary Habeck (Ph.D. in History from Yale University, former Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS)
“The assertion that religious actors resort to violence merely out of ordinary ‘grievance’ completely misinterprets the religious mind. For the Islamist ideologue, violence is not a reactive political tactic to settle a grievance; it is a proactive, devotional obligation intended to reshape the world order in accordance with divine sovereignty as dictated by foundational seventh-century texts.”
Source: Habeck, Mary. Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. Yale University Press, 2006, p. 167.
Cole’s Exact Words:
“Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s…one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land…is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence.”
The Refutation
Cole attempts to equate the localized, territorial, and ethnic conflicts of the Israeli-Palestinian issue with global Islamic militancy.
He fails to mention that Zionist underground groups in the 1940s (like the Irgun or Lehi) were secular eth-nationalist organizations fighting for statehood. They did not possess a religious text commanding them to launch a global war to subjugate all non-Jews.
True scholarship on terrorism distinguishes between groups with limited political/territorial goals (which can negotiate) and groups with cosmic, text-driven mandates (like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Boko Haram) that view total dominance as a divine command.
Bruce Hoffman (Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Professor at Georgetown University, and widely considered the world’s leading expert on terrorism studies).
“Religious terrorism is not merely a subset of political terrorism. For the religious terrorist, violence is a sacramental act or a divine duty executed in direct response to a theological imperative. Unlike secular nationalists who seek to create a political state and are restrained by political pragmatism, the theological warrior operates without political boundaries, viewing his struggle as a total war against infidels.”
Source: Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 82.
Cole’s Exact Words:
“Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century…”
The Refutation
Cole cites 1930s Japanese Zen orders to prove that Buddhism is just as structurally violent as Islam.
He leaves out the historical fact that imperial Japan was a fascist, hyper-nationalist state that explicitly subverted and forced state-controlled Shintoism and Zen Buddhism to align with military goals.
There is not a single line in the Buddhist Tripitaka where the Buddha commands his followers to launch offensive military campaigns or wage holy war against non-Buddhists. Islam, conversely, contains explicit legal dictates for warfare (Jihad) within its core text and prophetic traditions.
Brian Daizen Victoria (Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University, a Buddhist priest himself, and preeminent scholar on Japanese militarism).
“The alignment of Japanese Zen orders with twentieth-century state militarism was not the fulfillment of Buddhist doctrine, but its complete perversion—what can be termed ‘Imperial Way Buddhism.’ The state systematically co-opted, coerced, and distorted traditional Buddhist concepts of selflessness to serve the totalitarian and secular imperial ambitions of the military government.”
Source: Victoria, Brian Daizen. Zen at War. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 45.
Cole’s Exact Words:
“I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so…mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame…”
The Refutation
To keep his 20th-century Muslim death toll low, Cole shifts the blame for the Iran-Iraq War and Afghan conflicts onto “Europeans.” This is a patronizing, unscholarly worldview that strips Middle Eastern nations of their own moral agency. He implies that Muslims only kill each other because Europeans manipulate them.
The Iran-Iraq war was launched by Saddam Hussein’s geopolitical ambitions and exacerbated by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia-Islamist revolutionary theology, which openly called for the overthrow of secular Arab states to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate. Europeans did not invent the ancient Sunni-Shia theological chasm that fueled the conflict.
Efraim Karsh (Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London).
“The tendency of Western academics to blame European imperialism for modern Middle Eastern conflicts is a form of intellectual orientalism that denies regional actors their own agency and responsibility. The Iran-Iraq War was an indigenous explosion of regional rivalries, driven directly by Saddam’s secular Ba’athist ambition and Khomeini’s radical vision of exporting the Islamic Revolution.”
Source: Karsh, Efraim. The Iran-Iraq War: 1980–1988. Osprey Publishing, 2002, p. 12.
Summary
Dear readers, let us look at the wreckage of Juan Cole’s arguments once the light of real academic scholarship is turned upon them. When we pull back the curtain on this 2015 blog post, we find a deliberate, systematic attempt to rewrite history.
- He Invents Fraudulent Labels: Cole fabricated the unscientific term ‘people of Christian heritage’ to blame the Church for World War I, World War II, and the French war in Algeria. True history shows these mass slaughters were engineered by explicitly secular, anti-theistic communist, and anti-Christian Nazi regimes operating on Social Darwinism and raw geopolitical greed, not Christian orthodoxy.
- He Suppresses Massive Historical Data: To shield Islamic history and protect his personal bias, Cole locked his data into a tiny 100-year window. He deliberately hid 1,400 years of aggressive Islamic imperialism, completely erasing the 60 million non-Muslims wiped out during the conquests of India, the millions devastated by the Arab-Islamic slave trade in Africa, and the 1.5 million Christian souls liquidated in the Armenian Jihad.
- He Distorts Private Capital for Religious Crusades: Cole rebranded King Leopold II’s private corporate syndicate in the Congo as a ‘Christian’ conquest. In reality, Leopold’s venture was a secular corporation that bypassed and deceived the Church. The true heroes who exposed Leopold and stripped him of his power were black and white Christian missionaries acting directly on the authority of the Gospel.
- He Employs False Equivalences: Cole engaged in desperate blame-shifting, equating the Taliban—who act in direct compliance with orthodox Islamic text-based jurisprudence—with Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an isolated, syncretic cult based on traditional spirit possession and witchcraft that routinely massacres orthodox African Christians.
- He Uses Unscientific Guesswork: Cole abandoned peer-reviewed empirical metrics, admitting his numbers were based on phrases like ‘I don’t figure’ and ‘let’s say.’ He then weaponized unreliable crime statistics from closed Islamic autocracies to make a fraudulent moral contrast with transparent Western data.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, violence is a universal human flaw driven by predatory ambition and geopolitical greed, entirely independent of the dogma in Christ. True scholarship demonstrates that ideas matter, and we must judge an ideology by its foundational texts, not by geographic proximity.
European colonizers had to censor and subvert the New Testament—creating the ‘Slave Bible’—because orthodox Christian theology explicitly mandates spiritual equality and condemns man-stealing. Whenever the authentic Christian message was unlocked, it produced abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and anti-colonial resistance leaders who fought for human dignity.
Conversely, Islamic imperialism from the 7th century onward did not have to alter its foundational scriptures; its continuous genocidal expansions, its structural humiliation of religious minorities, and its ongoing aggression were executed in direct, literal obedience to its core texts. Juan Cole’s thesis completely collapses under the weight of rigorous, objective, and peer-reviewed historical evidence.”
Therefore, to my Muslim opponent, and to anyone who would subsequently share Juan Cole’s post: Be very careful.
You must know that Juan Cole, despite holding an academic title, has committed an act of profound intellectual dishonesty in this text. This post is not peer-reviewed scholarship; it is a partisan polemic that fundamentally undermines the standards of academic integrity. Cole has suppressed raw historical data, manipulated timelines, and exaggerated casualties for the sole purpose of defending Islam.
He has falsely accused Christians of atrocities they never committed, using cheap generalizations and strawman arguments. He has stamped a ‘Christian’ label on the bloody hands of atheists, secularists, and ungodly nations. By sharing his post, you are not sharing scholarship; you are spreading historical disinformation. If you want to critique Christianity, do so with rigorous, honest history—not with a biased, debunked blog post that collapses under the scrutiny of the very academic world Cole claims to represent
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