Roger Cohen, "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power": Sick

[Following my complaint by e-mail to Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times, the title of this op-ed was changed from "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power" to "The Dilemmas of Israeli Power." Rosenthal did not write back to me.]

In May 2009, The New York Times published an op-ed by Roger Cohen entitled "Obama in Netanyahu's Web" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28iht-edcohen.html). I quickly shot off an e-mail to a very senior editor of The Times:

"The Times should have given more thought to the title of Cohen's op-ed. As I tried to illustrate in my e-mail to Clark Hoyt, there is a long anti-Semitic history of depicting Jews as ugly voracious spiders. Netanyahu is no spider, and Obama is no butterfly. The title could only serve to inflame hatred."

The very senior editor replied:

"It was not a good headline, I agree. By the time this column gets to the times website it has already been published in the IHT [International Herald Tribune] on paper and online. This is not an excuse. It is an explanation. The headline should have been changes there [sic]."

Problem resolved? Not a chance.

Today, The New York Times published an op-ed by Roger Cohen entitled "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/cohen-the-dilemmas-of-jewish-power.html?ref=opinion). Does this title remind you of something? It should. In a 1935 speech to the Reichstag introducing the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler stated (http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc35.html):

"The third [law] is an attempt to regulate by law [the Jewish] problem, which, should this attempt fail, must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution."

"Jewish dilemmas"? "Jewish problem"? They sound frighteningly alike.

Hitler, like most other anti-Semites, believed that the Jews wielded too much power. Note that Cohen's headline is not "The Dilemmas of Israeli Power," but rather "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power."

The hallucinatory content of Cohen's current op-ed? Extolling Peter Beinart’s book “The Crisis of Zionism,” Cohen writes:

"'We are being asked to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood that evades the central Jewish question of our age: the question of how to ethically wield Jewish power,' he [Beinhart] writes. That power, for 45 years now, has been exercised over millions of Palestinians who enjoy none of the rights of citizenship and all the humiliations of an occupied people."

Needless to say, no mention by Cohen that although Palestinian Authority President Abbas was elected to serve until January 2009, Abbas unilaterally extended his term for another year and continues in office long after the expiration of the new deadline for elections. Hamas also continues to rule Gaza without new elections. Nevertheless, Cohen would have us believe that only Israel is depriving the Palestinians of the rights of citizenship.

No mention by Cohen of the fact that Hamas leader Ismail Haniya met yesterday with Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei (see: http://abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&id=296236), and that both these men are calling for the extermination of Israel. Moreover, even Fatah refuses to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Cohen writes:

"Blaming Palestinians — for disunity, for grandstanding, for seeking not the 1967 lines but Israel’s disappearance — is easy enough, although increasingly an exercise in misrepresentation of the major Palestinian shifts under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad."

No mention by Cohen that Hamas and Fatah are in unity talks and that one of Hamas's conditions is that Fayyad will not participate as a minister in any future Palestinian government (see: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=395957).

We have come to expect these distortions and this hate provoking language from Roger ("Iran is not totalitarian") Cohen; my guess is that he can't help himself. The New York Times, on the other hand, has no excuse.

Sick.