THE SPINE AUGUST 10, 2009
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Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.
But Cohen is a special case. He wrote several pieces from Iran early this year, and anybody reading them would be hard-put to call them other than suck-ups. All of this was before the electoral calamity that befell the country in what Cohen anticipated would be a reaffirmation of the country's "old-itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution." One fact is apparent: this man does his research in Wikipedia. Better than writing from total ignorance, I suppose. Or maybe not. By the way, this column was reprinted by Hezbollah with a macabre cartoon at its side.
"I'm convinced," wrote Cohen in a prior Times column, that "the 'Mad Mullah' caricature of Iran and likening any compromise with it to Munich 1938 ... is misleading and dangerous." Maybe it is. (But it has never been made in this space or any space adjoining.) Still, what's wrong with the Munich analogy? Dachau was opened in March 1933, soon after the Nazis entered the government. Buchenwald welcomed all comers already in 1937.
Cohen's standards for an evil regime are quite specific and tough. He will not judge Tehran harshly until it murders many many Jews. Not that he's especially sensitive about Jews. What he won't contemplate is that Dr. Ahmadinejad is quite serious about with his menacing of Israel. And he hasn't weighed--he will not weigh--the heavy valence of the Iranian president's denial of the Jewish catastrophe.
OK, he was taken in by his hosts and particularly by his designated Jewish hosts in Esfehan. Or, rather, he took in his readers. Read Jonathan S. Tobin's detailed account of Cohen's slippery ways.
So how has Cohen dealt with the torments to which hundreds of thousands of Iranians have been treated since the election? Maybe the Nazi analogy is a bit overwrought, although I'm not at all sure it is. And I am not sure either that the Neville Chamberlain is much misplaced.
Now that we know about the arrest, torture and rape of many thousands of democrats we can surely see a nexus with Stalinism and its show trials. Iran's "sophistication and culture"--as Cohen so smugly put it--were overwhelmed by its brutality and Islamic fanaticism.
I don't think even the Times would allow Cohen to write directly about Iran now. There is too much shame in his judgements. Instead, the Times magazine assigned him to do a piece about who makes American policy in Iran. Four pages-plus of type spread out over eight pages with 68 tiny photos of God only knows what.
It has one target, and that is Dennis Ross "who embraced the Jewish faith after being raised in a non-religious home by a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather." I don't know exactly what exactly Cohen means by "embraced the Jewish faith." It's a stilted phrase. Maybe Ross is a Jew, plain and simple. In any case, Cohen makes the argument--sometimes in his own words, sometimes in the words of others like Aaron David Miller, who in his last real job was a Maine camp director for Israeli and Palestinian kids and otherwise a nothing--that Ross is prejudiced for Israel and against Iran.
Almost a page and a half of Cohen's four of print is devoted to the danger Ross poses to American foreign policy, the more so now that he is on the staff of the National Security Council which, as it happens, is headquartered in the White House. But many of the policy-makers charged with Israel (and the rest of the Middle East) were Jews, including Miller himself, the shadowy Martin Indyk, Sandy Berger, others including Ross. They served James Baker who had not an ounce of sympathy for Israel and Bill Clinton, who "loved" Israel in his extravagant manner but did not hesitate to squeeze the last drop of concessions from Ehud Barak and still find that Yassir Arafat left the talks without any marbles to play. It is an ugly scandal that Cohen charges Ross with being prejudiced towards Israel because of the money he earned making speeches came from Jewish and pro-Israel groups. I kid you not. My God, the whole foreign policy establishment earned their retirement from the Emirates and other Arab fiefdoms.
Frankly, I wonder what role Cohen's own "Jewish faith," such as it is or is not, plays in his rancor towards Ross. Cohen strikes me as one of those highly assimilated British Jews--yes, he came here and converted to being an American--who are made more than a bit nervous by Jews who have real Jewish commitments.
By the way, I haven't spoken with Dennis Ross in fully a year. What we discussed (over the phone) then was Darfur which agitated him greatly.
As for Israel and his views, I do not know them and I do not trust Cohen's seedy approximations. I hope that Ross is tired of the old and failed formulas for a settlement. Even the Palestinians who would get almost everything for virtually nothing are not for these axiomatic but deeply flawed formulas. But it is the president who makes policy, and he is a long way from seeing the Israeli-Palestinian realities clearly.
I've just finished a post-Six Day War novel by the Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz. It is called Karnak Caf
16 comments
Believe it or not, Roger Cohen actually has a fine piece on the suppression of the Green Revolution in the current issue (August 13) of the New York Review of Books. I was nodding my head as I perused his article, until I reached the part where he wrote about how Barack Obama should cut a deal with Syria. Vintage Cohen, that. As with the Panchen Lamas and the hidden imam of Shiism, I think there is a similar recursiveness with the Rabbi of Chelm. Its current incarnate soul, I believe, is none other than R. Cohen. So you didn't say if the Naguib Mahfouz tale is good. The only work that I have read by the late Nobelist is The Thief and the Dogs and I didn't much care for it.
- liberal reformer
August 10, 2009 at 11:44pm
Let me ask you about Dennis Ross, "who embraced the Jewish faith after being raised in a non-religious home by a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather."
Isn't this the sort of thing G-d will resolve on Judgment Day? Remember the scene from Crimes and Misdemeanors when Martin Landau confronts the ghosts from family dinners past? What got resolved? Not a single solitary thing.
If Cohen is all the things you say he is, isn't his fate already sealed by G-d because he is not all the things you say you [or Dennis Ross] is?
Once you open the door and let religious faith in you jump the shark in discussions like this. After all, if G-d is both omnipresent and omniscient how in the world [THIS world] is that to be reconciled with human autonomy? Either God is everywhere and knows all, or He isn't and doesn't. "Resolving it" just takes us around and around in the same circle philosophers tread when they try to reconcile free will [mind] and determinism [matter].
Dualism has always been a bottomless pit of quicksand. Once you step in you almost never, ever get back out.
Besides, what difference does it really make discussing who is or who is not "prejudiced" for or against one of the hundreds and hundreds of conflicting Gods folks are always inventing like so many unicorns or leprechauns or tooth fairies.
I suspect G-d would hardly come up at all if each and everyone of us were immortal.
george walton
dan/ann
- iambiguous
August 11, 2009 at 7:12am
Ignore the stupid and antisemitic Walton.
But read:
"Roger Cohen Digs Himself Deeper" By J.J. Goldberg
"That, in effect, is the dilemma facing American policy toward Iran at this pivotal moment: Is there too much Jewish influence? We’ve heard the question before in Hamas sermons, in Al Qaeda videos and on some left-wing blogs. Now it’s been incorporated into the nation’s newspaper of record.
Is Cohen trying to mainstream bigotry? I suspect not. I think he’s trying to sound provocative, and I think he’s in over his head."
forward.com/.../111452
- J. Dyer
August 11, 2009 at 11:11am
From the link above:
"Roger Cohen was born in London in 1955 and is a naturalized American citizen now living in New York. Oxford-educated, he made his reputation as a savvy foreign correspondent for Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, and the Times."
Born in Great Britain, no surprise there.
Many British educated intellectuals are also antisemitic.
- J. Dyer
August 11, 2009 at 11:15am
A few tidbits on Roger Cohen & his article :
a) A very well informed source (who shall go nameless) has told me that during the past couple of years, Cohen met and became quite friendly with one David Axelrod (a.k.a., The Axe). Cohen's approach to Iran & Israel may actually reflect the views of Axelrod, who is thought to be slightly to the left of J Street.
b) Dr. MP (who has given Cohen a pass in the past) failed to quote the most damning part of Tobin's dissection of Cohen & his ilk:
"What Cohen did not write, though he admitted it in his [talk at a Los Angeles synagogue to a group of Iranian exiles], is that his interviews of Iranian Jews were conducted through a government-appointed translator and handler (Cohen does not speak Farsi) who he acknowledged would report to his masters in Tehran about both the journalist and those he met. Given the penalty for bucking the Islamist line about Israel for any Iranian, let alone a member of a despised minority, a less credulous journalist would not have taken the fruit of such interviews at face value. But Cohen not only reported the answers of his interlocutors as if they were a genuine reflection of Jewish opinion in Iran, he inflated them into a rationale for the Iran policy he wishes the United States to follow."
In other words, in the finest NY Times tradition Cohen is proving himself to be a worthy successor to Walter Duranty. Maybe Cohen can get Pulitzer for his Duranty-like reporting on Iran.
c) For a very incisive dissection of Cohen’s recent Iran & US Policy piece see JJ Goldberg in The Forward here: www.forward.com/.../111452
For the record, The Forward has a strong left-wing orientation and largely identifies with the editorial position of Ha’aretz. They seem to have a cross publishing agreement. Jeff Goldberg (no relation to JJ) at The Atlantic (here: jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/.../the_1_threat_to_america_is_den.php ) quotes the JJ piece:
“In a 5,000-word article in the August 2 Sunday Times Magazine, (Cohen) unraveled the tangled lines of authority in Obama's Iran policy-making. The loose thread, he strongly suggested, was veteran diplomat Dennis Ross, an "ultimate Washington survivor," who started at the Obama State Department, left in a "fiasco" and moved in a "bizarre odyssey" to the National Security Council.
Ross's role in the administration raises many questions in Cohen's mind, but the one that comes up over and over throughout the article, "a recurrent issue with Ross, who embraced his Jewish faith after being raised in a non-religious home by a Jewish mother and a Catholic stepfather, has been whether he is too close to the American Jewish community and Israel to be an honest broker with Iran or Arabs." In the crisis atmosphere following the Iranian election, "Can this baggage-encumbered veteran... overcome ingrained habits and sympathies?" Indeed, "Will the Iranians be prepared to meet with Ross?" -- a "reasonable question given Ross's well-known ties with the American Jewish community."
That, in effect, is the dilemma facing American policy toward Iran at this pivotal moment: Is there too much Jewish influence? We've heard the question before in Hamas sermons, in Al Qaeda videos and on some left-wing blogs. Now it's been incorporated into the nation's newspaper of record.”
d) Lastly, Jeff Goldberg himself (here: jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/.../roger_cohen_translated.php ) did the best and most succinct summary of Cohen’s progressobabblian screed:
“The Making of an Iran Policy, by Roger Cohen
Iran is going to get the Bomb. This is okay. Iran's government is not nice. They used to be nice, but not anymore. It doesn't matter. Israel wants to stop Iran from getting the Bomb. One thing is clear: Them Jews is crazy. They must be stopped. Dennis Ross works in the American government. But he's Jewish. Is he too Jewish to talk to Iran? Maybe. But he could make the Jews learn to love the Iranian bomb. It remains to be seen.
The End”
-------------------------------
Hershel Ginsburg
Jerusalem / Efrata
- ginzy
August 11, 2009 at 11:18am
Walton, I usually don't comment on your posts but I would like to point out that your apparently ironic use of "G-d" is extraordinarily offensive to observant Jews, many of whom are accustomed to eliminating the vowel in the English word "God" in order to maintain the commandment against writing out the entire name of the Almighty and/or erasing such name when typing on a keyboard. I suspect that you are not Jewish and may not be aware of this, but I would kindly suggest that you refrain from doing so in the future. A little elementary respect for other people's core religious sensibilities is a good sentiment for all to share, even for those who have no religious sensibilities of their own.
- wildboy
August 11, 2009 at 11:20am
Wildboy -- As one of the few (if not the only) Orthodox Jew posting in these parts, Walton's use of "G-d" doesn't bother me. If anything I find it amusing since it implies a certain degree of recognition which is (or should be) anathema for an Orthodox Atheist.
hg
- ginzy
August 11, 2009 at 11:31am
Ginzy, you and me makes at least two Orthodox Jews on this website, with at least three opinions among us, for sure. If we can draft Marty, Leon, Jonathans Chait and Cohn and a few other staff writers into the mix we are well on our way to a minyan, and Crowley can always do guest postings on Shabbos (just because it's the proper thing to do, of course).
On the Walton front, you are a more of a mensch than I am -- while I don't really care about using "God" and "G-d" in these postings interchangeably (after all, the English word is not literally the Tetragrammaton), the intentionally ironic use by a non-Jew like Walton smacks of nasty and foolish anti-Semitism. For example, I would do a Catholic the courtesy of not writing sarcastically about the Eucharist in a Talkback post, even if the Catholic wouldn't be offended doing so. It's more respect than irony.
- wildboy
August 11, 2009 at 12:24pm
Thank you for the very informative post, ginzy.
- liberal reformer
August 11, 2009 at 1:12pm
Thank you libs.
Wildboy -- only three opinions?. BTW I don't believe writing on a keyboard is considered "writing" for purposes of writing God's name, at least until you click on "print". As far as it not literally being the Tetragrammaton, you are correct but there is a strain in p'sak, notably the custom of Eretz Yisra'el through the era of the Ge'onim to take a very stringent definition of what constitutes "Sheimot" and within that approach, "God" very much qualifies. That is why the Cairo Geniza existed since the Ben Ezra synagogue followed the customs and p'sak of Ge'onei Eretz Yisra'el even after the Crusades which ended the last remnants of Ge'onei Eretz Yisra'el.
hg
- ginzy
August 11, 2009 at 4:26pm
This applies even more to Roger Cohen:
www.theaugeanstables.com/.../print
- J. Dyer
August 11, 2009 at 5:46pm
Ginzy, nothing like a good shiur among friends. As for opinions, every Jew "contains multitudes" and we have done so long long before Walt Whitman showed up on the scene.
- wildboy
August 11, 2009 at 7:50pm
wild:
your apparently ironic use of "G-d" is extraordinarily offensive to observant Jews, many of whom are accustomed to eliminating the vowel in the English word "God" in order to maintain the commandment against writing out the entire name...
george:
If my use of the word "G-d" offended anyone, I apologize. It was not my intention to offend.
A few months ago I posted my view that practicing Christians, Jews and Mulims all worshop the same God. The God of Moses and Abraham. I knew that Christians called Him God [or The Lord] and Muslims called him Allah. But I wasn't sure what Jews called Him.
I goggled it to find out. That's when I came upon "G-d".
So, what should I have used?
Anyway, my point about religion almost always focuses on the following:
1]
The manner in which the religious zealots [of any and all denominations] have, historically, used God to commit the most atrocious barbarities in His name.
2]
The manner in which the secular demigods [Fascists, Communists etc] substitute Reason, or Race, or Tribe or Etnicity etc. for God and commit the most atrocious barbarities in the name of The Cause.
I'm a pragmatist. So, for all practical purposes, I point out how zealots often embody the most dangerous of all psychological defense mechanism: the authoritarian personality.
Authoritarians are people who believe that how they see the world around them reflects The Whole Truth. The True Believers. And one way or the other the True Believers often end up making the lives of The Infidels rather miserable.
On the other hand, I never reduce religious faith down to this. And I would certainly never harrangue or ridicule any one particular individual who believed in any one particular God. After all, religion has been the source for any number of great accomplishments in the history of mankind.
In the modern world, however, religious faith becomes all the more problematic because it is often embedded deeply in all manifestations of wealth and power. The Great God, The Almighty Buck is capable of infecting religion just as easily as it infects lots of other things.
george
- iambiguous
August 12, 2009 at 5:10am
Ginzy writes: "As far as it not literally being the Tetragrammaton, you are correct but there is a strain in p'sak, notably the custom of Eretz Yisra'el through the era of the Ge'onim to take a very stringent definition of what constitutes "Sheimot" and within that approach, "God" very much qualifies."
This is wildly off topic, but I can't resist. Wildboy is certainly correct that many observant Jews are accustomed to eliminating the vowel in the English word "God" in order to maintain the commandment against writing out the entire name of the Almighty. I am respectful of those sensibilities. But let me note that the English word 'God' is not a name; it is a title, like 'the Almighty'. To be sure, 'God' is used, at least by religious folks, with the intention of referring to God; but those folks use 'G-d' to the same purpose. So if 'God' counts as Sheimot, so does 'G-d'. Obviously, the latter doesn't, so neither does the former.
- JPKatz
August 12, 2009 at 8:37am
In Hebrew, the names of God (outside of the Tetragrammaton) are titles or descriptors and are treated with almost the same reverence as the name itself. When writing one of these names (except for the Tetragrammaton) on something that might get erased, destroyed or disposed of in an ignominious fashion, the custom is to either switch a letter or to insert a hyphen or substitute a hyphen for a letter. This practice was transplanted into other languages as Jews were dispersed around the globe.
hg
- ginzy
August 12, 2009 at 8:54am
Ginzy, I beg to disagree. Maimonides says that there are seven names for God (Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 6:2). Some commentators question some of the names that he mentions, but it is clear that there is more than one. According to Maimonides, one is forbidden to erase or destroy any inscription of any of these names. The same, however, is not true of descriptive terms: "Other descriptive terms which are used to praise the Holy One, blessed be He--e.g., the Gracious, the Merciful, the Great, the Mighty, the Awesome, the Faithful, the Jealous, the Powerful, and the like are considered as other holy texts and may be erased" (6:5). Needless to say, one should not dispose of any holy text in an ignominious fashion, whether or not it contains such a term.
As far as I know, the custom that you mention--switching a letter or substituting a hyphen for a letter-- occurs in English only with respect to the word 'God'. In any case, I've never encountered inscriptions like 'the Alm-ghty' or 'the H-ly One'. But let me press my point: why would the term 'God' have any greater sanctity than 'G-d'? The latter is not a substitute for the former, it is just a non-standard spelling of it.
- JPKatz
August 12, 2009 at 4:45pm