> I'm not an expert, but I'm inclined to take Prof.
> Cole's detailed analysis more seriously than the Kos post
What his analysis shows is that there are more governmental accomplices than just Saudi gov't - e.g. Egyptian gov't covering up their crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood, or opinions posted in influential Islamic papers (which still take cues from governments). It certainly does NOT disprove that the Saudi gov't fanned it out to deflect public criticism over the (yet another) Hajj disaster. It simply says that other governments participated as well, presumably also for their own selfish reasons.
While the multiple accomplice story is certainly more convincing than a single perpetrator story, both point in one and same direction - that the whole thing was manufactured from above for internal purposes - a classical example of using foreigners as scapegoats for domestic problems - no different than, say, US right-wingers stirring anti-French, anti UN or anti-European sentiments.
Wojtek