president for 2006. In 2006, he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism administered by Hunter College. He is a member of the Community Council of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Notable work Cole founded the Global Americana Institute to translate works concerning the United States into Arabic. The first volume was selected works of Thomas Jefferson, and the second was a translation of a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. along with selected speeches and writings. Current affairs history After September 11, 2001, Cole turned increasingly to writing on radical Muslim movements, the Iraq War, United States foreign policy, and the Iran crisis. He calls his work not "contemporary history" but "current affairs history". Cole testified on Iraq before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2004. Informed Comment blog Since 2002, Cole has published the blog Informed Comment, covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror". Cole's prominence quickly rose through his blog, and Foreign Policy commented in 2004, "Cole's transformation into a public intellectual embodies many of the dynamics that have heightened the impact of the blogosphere. He wanted to publicize his expertise, and he did so by attracting attention from elite members of the blogosphere. As Cole made waves within the virtual world, others in the real world began to take notice". In 2006 National Journal called Cole "the most respected voice on foreign policy on the left" and his blog ranked the 99th most popular in 2009, but it has since fallen off the list. Views Leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Cole chastised several candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney, for making bellicose statements about Iran in order to present themselves in a tougher or more conservative light. In 2002, Cole rejected the Bush administration's early claims of Iraqi cooperation with Al-Qaeda, commenting that Saddam Hussein had "persecuted and killed both Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists in great number", as well as claims to the effect that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Rather than making America safer, he says, the war has ironically had the opposite effect: inspiring anti-U.S. militants. In a 2005 speech at the Middle East Policy Council, Cole was critical of the U.S. allying itself with offshoots of the Islamic Dawa Party in Iraq but vehemently opposing Hezbollah in Lebanon. Ahmadinejad's remarks on Israel Cole and Christopher