After New York Times columnist Roger Cohen went to an L.A. synagogue to defend his views on Iran and the state of the Jews there, the synagogue’s rabbi, David Wolpe, penned his impressions of the encounter on The Huffington Post:
Increasingly I came to believe that Iran was not Cohen’s sole concern; he wanted it as a stick with which to beat Israel over Gaza, whose incursion he wrote left him ashamed…
To my mind the challenges I offered him, and the audience offered, were met with restatements of the same position, and little acknowledgment of the force of the argument. I asked "You advocate negotiations with Hamas and Hizbollah, arguing that they can be pragmatic. What if Hamas and Hizbollah had the arms of Israel and Israel had their force of arms. What do you think would happen?" To my amazement, he said he didn’t know. Well, I do. And so does he. For all the thoughtless and ignorant cry that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ no one doubts the true genocide that would befall the Jews of Israel if Hamas had a superior force of arms. As Iran moves closer to a nuclear weapon, such a question becomes less and less theoretical.
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic also finds Cogen assessment of Hamas and Hezbollah credulous.
You can read JTA’s blogposts on Cohen here.
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