Free Republic

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...

FULL TITLE: Dan Gainor: Media decide Trump is wrong on Iran — whether he strikes back or not. Plus, more press missteps Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. Welcome to the media’s Iran coverage where President Donald Trump is never really right — whether he responds militarily to Iran or opts not to do so. Iran, a theocratic loony bin that is the world’s No. 1 terror state, shot down a military drone this week that was worth at least $130 million. While it was flying over international waters. What followed was a high-speed, condensed version of media...

It’s the contempt that’s so contemptible: President Trump’s contempt for the Constitution to which he swore an oath, for the F.B.I. that’s allegedly in “Tatters” (sic), for the majority of Americans (including his base) who will be worse off from a fat tax cut for the richest, for the shared wonder inspired by our public lands, for America’s allies, for the science that explains why it’s getting warmer, for due process, for truth, for informed debate, for the press, for the values anchored by liberty that the United States has attempted to represent to the world. That’s a lot of...

THE NEW York Times has launched a blistering attack on Australia’s controversial asylum seeker policy, slamming Immigration Minister Peter Dutton as our “own little Trump”. The weekend feature, called ‘Broken Men in Paradise’, sees Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen speaking to various detainees on Manus Island and Nauru, and human rights lawyers. His article deems Australia’s policy of offshore detention a “growing embarrassment” to the country, concluding that Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is Australia’s version of President-election Donald Trump. “The government says it has prevented deaths like those in the Mediterranean, where more than 4,000 migrants have drowned this year,”...

Ezri Tubi, spokesperson for the Samaria community of Yitzhar, released a video on Wednesday debunking the claims of Roger Cohen, a former editor of the New York Times who happens to be Jewish. Cohen claimed that Palestinian Arabs ride around in “donkey carts” on “dirt roads” to their orchards, while Jews ride in fancy cars on modern highways nearby—so Tubi drove through the Arab village of Huwara located near his home to test the ex-editor’s claims. What Tubi found were luxury cars made by Mercedes-Benz and other leading makers, driven by Arab residents on clean paved roads. …

A very important movie about the Holocaust made its way to New York City for the first time this week at the end of a tortuous journey that began 70 years ago when Allied forces and newsreel cameramen stumbled into Nazi concentration camps. Called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” it is as unadorned as its title, a document shot in the moment to capture forever evidence of the unimaginable. Made under the auspices of the British Ministry of Information, produced by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television, assembled with advice from Alfred Hitchcock, the movie was meant to ram...

The good news is that The New York Times has to dump another hundred reporters. The bad news is that Tom Friedman is still on the beat. But the paper, constantly eyeing Der Sturmer for inspiration, keeps losing readers in droves. People have begun to catch on. They’re catching on to what I’ve been saying for years, that The New York Times is the most anti-Semitic newspaper in the entire world. […] Today’s op-ed needle comes from yet another scoffer named Roger Cohen—or is this the same dunce who appears time and again? I don’t know. […] So what’s the...

The New York Times' Roger Cohen, who is not exactly a friend of the Jewish state, admits the truth in this New York Times op-ed: The BDS movement aims to bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these developments make me uneasy for a simple reason: I do not trust the B.D.S. movement. Its stated aim is to end the occupation, secure “full equality” for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and fight for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. The first objective is essential to Israel’s future. The second is laudable. The third, combined with...

An op-ed published in the New York Times on Tuesday by Roger Cohen, titled "My Jewish State" has shed light on comments Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid made during a sit down with the columnist in August 2013. During their chat last summer, Lapid reiterated his lack of interest in Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Lapid reportedly told Cohen “the fact that we demand from Palestinians a declaration that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I just think this is rubbish. I don’t need that. The whole point of Israel was we came here saying we...

It never ceases to amaze me that people who know nothing about the Middle East, in this case Roger Cohen but many other names come to mind, can suddenly proclaim themselves experts and make the most elementary errors involving the lives of other people. It also never ceases to amaze me that people can visit a country, especially a dictatorship, be wined and dined, handed a line and believe it so thoroughly that their mind is closed ever after. Recently, I met a young man who helped me understand this phenomenon better. He worked on Afghanistan and took exception to...

Roger Cohen of the New York Times is rapidly becoming Iran’s foremost apologist in the United States — which is saying something considering how many others are all too willing to excuse and explain away the mullahs’ murderous misconduct. In his latest special pleading on behalf of the theocratic dictators in Tehran, Cohen trots out the Mother of All Dumb Analogies: “Imagine if Roosevelt in 1942 had said to Stalin, sorry, Joe, we don’t like your Communist ideology so we’re not going to accept your help in crushing the Nazis. I know you’re powerful, but we don’t deal with evil.”

The French writer François Mauriac once said during the cold war that he loved Germany so much, he was glad there were two of them. After what an undivided Germany had done to France in World War II and before, that was understandable. To paraphrase Mauriac, I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States. Don’t get me wrong, I think President Obama’s counter-revolution goes in the right direction. In fact, it’s less a question of right and wrong with his budget than of necessity. After...

...Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable...

One set of facts, two diametrically different NYT op-eds addressing it this morning. The fact: that Barack Obama is backpedaling as fast as he can away from the hateful anti-American rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright. The op-eds: Bill Kristol's, offering a dose of sobering realism about Obama's feet that if not of clay, then are certainly those of a garden-variety politician. And then there's Roger Cohen's, the Obama fan who, in a bit of breathtaking revisionism, would explain away Barack's moonwalk on the theory the candidate has simply "grown beyond" the mettlesome minister. And Cohen's just fine with that. Compare and...

"Good evening, this is Katie Couric. I'll be anchoring our Decision 2008 coverage tonight, as the world elects the next President of the United States. The polls closed just minutes ago in Pakistan but we're already able to declare Barack Obama the runaway winner in the Islamabad Capital Territory, and he seems poised to pull off a clean sweep of all Pakistan's provinces." OK, not even the New York Times is proposing -- yet -- giving the vote to everyone in the world. But for whatever reason, the Times's Roger Cohen apparently thinks the best thing he can say about...