Time & Perspective Quote by Juan Cole

Forget the fantasy that public attention naturally follows human stakes. Cole is describing a media-and-policy marketplace where the Middle East only “counts” when it can be flattened into one marquee storyline: the Arab-Israeli conflict. The sentence is doing quiet historical work. It situates a past moment when “Middle East” wasn’t a region Americans tracked as a web of societies, languages, and political movements, but a narrow aperture through which everything else was either invisible or irrelevant.

The phrasing “most of the Middle East” signals the imbalance: not ignorance in general, but selective curiosity. It’s an indictment without theatrics. Cole isn’t calling people malicious; he’s showing how attention gets rationed by familiar frames, lobbying ecosystems, newsroom incentives, and the U.S. foreign-policy habit of treating regions as problem-sets. “All that people were interested in” reads like lived experience inside academia: grants, invitations, op-eds, and student demand clustering around the conflict that already had institutional infrastructure and moral drama prepackaged for American consumption.

Then comes the personal pivot: “that was not my specialty.” Subtext: a scholar’s expertise can become professionally inconvenient when the public’s appetite narrows. Cole’s intent isn’t self-exculpation so much as a reminder that knowledge production is shaped by audience demand. If the gatekeepers only want one story, they end up training experts to feed it - and leave the rest of the region underexplained right up until a crisis forces everyone to pretend they were paying attention all along.