Roger Cohen, "Ripples of the Iran Deal": Palestinian Stabbings Are "Understandable"

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Apparently in response to Iran's arrest of another Iranian-American, Siamak Namazi, a businessman who has actively supported improved ties between the US and Iran, and the conviction earlier this month of Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian for espionage, Roger Cohen is celebrating Obama's "transformative" nuclear deal with Khamemei. In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Ripples of the Iran Deal," Cohen begins by observing:

"There was never any chance the Iran nuclear deal would be hermetic. One of its merits is to condemn the United States and Iran to a relationship, however hostile, over the next decade and a half at least. Now, within months, it has led to Iran’s presence at peace negotiations on Syria. That’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing because no end to the Syrian civil war is possible without the involvement of all the actors. Iran is one, directly and through its surrogate Hezbollah."

Got it: Iran orders Hezbollah fighters into Syria from Lebanon and is then invited by the Obama administration to participate in peace talks, and this is a "good thing." Why does this sound more like more appeasement coming from the White House?

Cohen continues:

"The fact is neither Khamenei, a hard-liner, nor the reformists led by President Hassan Rouhani can ignore the other."

Rouhani is a "reformer"? Iran, under Rouhani's leadership, executes more persons per capita than any other country in the world, and this rate is rising.

Next Cohen would have us know:

"But Iran has long been a useful distraction from Israel’s core problem, Palestine. Iran is far away from Jerusalem and Iranians seldom think about Israel."

Fascinating.  Iran's commander of it Quds Force, Major General Qasem Soleimani, recently visited Quneitra, one mile away from the Israel's border with Syria. Hey, Roger, given Iran's perpetual threats to exterminate Israel, what do you think he was doing there?

And then Cohen calls Palestinian stabbings of Israelis "understandable":

"Oppressed people will do such things. The oppression does not make random Palestinian stabbings of Israelis defensible. They are vicious crimes against innocent people. But it makes them understandable. Violence is the other face of the so-called status quo that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes to be in Israel’s interest. Violence is inextricable from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that is almost a half-century old. Stateless non-citizens, living behind a high-tech wall among colonial settler garrisons, will not all acquiesce to their fate."

"Understandable"? The wave of stabbings has nothing to do with Israeli settlements. Rather, it has to do with a baseless rumor that Israel plans to destroy the al Aqsa Mosque, which gave rise to Palestinian Authority President Abbas's declaration that Jews have no right to defile the Temple Mount with their "filthy feet". Of course, no mention of this by Cohen.

But more to the point, if oppressed persons from America's inner cities were to start stabbing middle-class whites, would Cohen also label such attacks as "understandable"? I don't think so.

And just to set the record straight, that "high-tech wall" to which Cohen refers is 90 percent fence. But why should the facts get in the way of Cohen?

Sickening.