A new blow to Iran's forgotten Jews

Isn’t there something incongruous about a human rights organization providing a platform to a journalist who has whitewashed human rights abuses?

Next week, an online event organized by the human rights group “3 Generations” will feature New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, who sparked an international furor in 2009 when he visited Iran and announced that the oppressed Jews there were not really so oppressed, after all.

Cohen’s assertion that Iranian Jews were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility” was met with scorn across the political spectrum. Jeffrey Goldberg, in The Atlantic, called him “credulous.” The Anti-Defamation League charged Cohen with viewing Iran through “dangerous rose-colored lenses.” J.J. Goldberg, in The Forward, characterized Cohen as “simply naive, and dangerously so.”

In subsequent writings and remarks, Cohen not only doubled down on his denial of Iran’s antisemitic persecution, but also heaped praise on the ruling authorities for treating him “with such consistent warmth.” That prompted caustic comments recalling notorious instances in history which other dictators wined and dined gullible foreign journalists.

That year’s annual State Department report on international religious freedom presented a very different picture from the one Cohen had painted. Iran’s 25,000 Jews were the victims of “officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing,” according to the 2009 report. The ruling regime “limited the distribution of Hebrew texts, particularly nonreligious texts, making it difficult to teach the language.” In addition, “There was a rise in officially sanctioned anti-Semitic propaganda involving official statements, media outlets, publications and books.”

Cohen tried—not very persuasively—to politicize the controversy. He claimed that allegations of Iranian Jewish suffering were conjured up by his political foes. ....

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....“The hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime” that is “frenziedly antisemitic,” Cohen asserted. Yet it was Barack Obama’s State Department that was portraying Iran as frenziedly antisemitic

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The “3 Generations” website describes a number of worthy projects that the group has in the works, although there is no mention of any plan to document the plight of Iran’s Jews. That’s a pity, because according to the most recent State Department report on the subject, the persecution of Iranian Jewry continues unabated.

The 9,000-15,000 Jews remaining in Iran “face societal discrimination and harassment,” the report says. They cannot serve in the judiciary, the security services, or various other professions. They “may not engage in public religious expression.” Jewish schools must have Muslim principals, must remain open on the Jewish Sabbath, and must have their curricula and textbooks approved by the authorities. Iranian government officials “employ anti-Semitic rhetoric in official statements and to sanction it in media outlets, publications, and books,” “government-sponsored rallies continued to include chants of ‘Death to Israel,’” and “local newspapers carried editorial cartoons that were anti-Semitic.”

All of which makes the upcoming appearance by Roger Cohen at the “3 Generations” event more than a little ironic: An unrepentant denier of anti-Jewish persecution will be featured by an organization whose creation was inspired by the suppression of a film about anti-Jewish persecution.

One wonders what Sidney Bernstein would have thought about this turn of events.

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