Three million . . . four million. . . do I hear five million jobs? Upping the job “creation” number sounds like something that was fifth or sixth on a staffer’s list of “Ways to get Americans to agree to a trillion dollars of debt.” The President-elect’s credibility is a precious thing and shouldn’t be frittered away with silly stunts like this.
And his media magic is waning. David Broder says the President-elect has taken a “drubbing” over the Bill Richardson and Blago/Roland Burris messes. So is the honeymoon over?
P.J. O’Rourke goes even farther: “Is it too soon to talk about the failed Obama presidency just because Obama isn’t president yet? That depends upon how quickly Barack Obama is able to apply the lessons he’s learned from Management Secrets of the Illinois Governors. So far he’s not doing very well. He has allowed America’s current number one jackleg, crackpot, smut-mouth, slime-licking politician to give the Obama Senate seat to a lovable old African-American doofus whom no one has the heart to execrate. Roland Burris will be the kind of ornament to this year’s Senate that the broken plastic Rudolph with its antlers missing was to last year’s Christmas tree.” (All kidding aside, it’s obviously too early to declare the presidency failed or even seriously damaged, but Obama’s image of infallibility has bitten the dust.)
Katon Dawson tells the New York Times the concern about his more than decade-long membership in a whites-only club is “so bogus.” (What is he– in sixth grade?) That’s probably what Harry Reid said about concerns over the backlash which might be triggered by throwing Burris out in the rain. What do you think is the first fact every single MSM outlet will mention if Dawson is eliminated? But it doesn’t matter what the MSM says because the GOP doesn’t have an image problem with minorities and has plenty of adherents, right? Oh, wait.
Grover Norquist explains Obama-nomics: “Taking a dollar from one side of the economy and spending it in another state is just moving wealth, jobs or income around. Nothing is created. Imagine Obama taking a bucket of water out of one side of the lake and carrying it around to the other side of the lake and then holding a press conference to have himself filmed ‘filling the lake with water.’ Does anyone outside of dead economists named Keynes believe that the level of water in the lake is now higher? That is his plan. It won’t work. We will waste billions building pyramids (ours are horizontal and called light rail and get fewer visitors than the pyramids). We will be left with the stench of corruption. Debt. And the kind of economic recovery people lived through in the 1930s–high unemployment, low wages, little investment.”
If you think the Bush administration made hash out of the Six Party talks, opened the door to big government and didn’t have the nerve to insist the car companies make fundamental changes you are in good company — with Vice President Dick Cheney. More than anything else, the Stephen Hayes interview reveals the degree to which Cheney was not calling the shots, at least in the second term.
Is Dick Durbin making sense on taxes?
Mitt Romney usually makes sense on taxes — which is one reason the House Republicans are inviting him to present his economic recovery ideas. He’s one of the few Republican candidates who came out looking better at the end than the beginning of the presidential race. (He’s also avoided any hint of intra-party nastiness, which is both smart and welcomed. Come to think of it, that might be why he seems less damaged than all the other former contenders.)
The language is a bit harsh in this piece, but I agree with this insight on Sarah Palin: “She would be wise to spend the next three years studying and formulating a world view rooted in facts. This is what Rudy Giuliani did after a less-than-stellar campaign for mayor of New York City that saw him lose to David Dinkins in 1989. He roared back four years later to serve two terms. Palin must do the same if she’s ever going to expand her popularity — or be taken seriously by anyone — beyond that narrow, aging and shrinking band of the Republican Party that likes things the way they were 20 years ago.” And really, the “media is unfair” routine is getting old.
Another observer finds President-elect Obama’s biggest problems reside on the Democratic side of the aisle: “Senator Reid’s gratuitous comments the other day that, ‘he does not work for the President’ is the first shot over Obama’s bow. The Democrats control everything, but in reality will they be in control? Can they control themselves?” I think the answers are “sometimes” and “no,” respectively.
Lately I’ve been finding myself in surprising agreement with some leftwingers around the blogosphere. Here’s today’s edition, this time from Salon: enough with the “Al Franken stole it” talk.
NEW YORK TIMES RETURNS PULITZER PRIZE
Newly discovered documentation proves Duranty wrong. Sulzberger “Proud as Pinch.”
NEW YORK (TNYRN) Edwin “Pinch” Sulzberger, Editor and Publisher of the New York Times, today announced that the “news” organization was repudiating the 1932 Pulitzer Prize it was awarded for the reporting by Soviet agent provocateur and Times reporter Walter Duranty.
“While it probably seems long overdue to some who don’t understand our standards of fact-checking,” said Sulzberger, “we at the Times needed complete assurance that the Soviet worker’s paradise reported by Duranty in the 1930s was, in fact, a monstrous hell-hole featuring purges, mass starvation, dictatorial rule and the imprisonment of millions innocent citizens. These facts have been very hard to come by. Only recently, through the exceptional diligence of Times reporters have we unearthed two obscure documents that prove conclusively that Mr. Duranty lied and that the Pulitzer Prize was falsely awarded.”
Asked to identify the documents, Mr. Sulzberger proudly held up two hard bound volumes. “Through hard work, the Times has unearthed a hitherto unknown book entitled The Gulag Archipelago by an obscure writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn,” said Sulzberger. “But this impressive work was not enough. As you know, we need two sources and so it was fortuitous that we found a second document which supports Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s allegations — an impressively annotated and well-researched work entitled The Great Terror by an unknown academic named Robert Conquest.”
Critics of the Times noted that Mr. Solzhentisyn was far from obscure and had, in fact, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and suffered an internationally publicized exile from his homeland in 1974 that was covered widely by every news source in the world, including the Times. Critics also noted that The Gulag Archipelago was published to international acclaim in 1973, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, was reviewed favorably by the New York Times and has, in fact, never been out of print.
“We’ve heard all that before,” said Sulzberger. “That is old news. This is new news. The Times got it right and, by God, we’re doing the right thing!”
Asked if the Times would also return prizes earned by Herbert Matthews, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and others, Sulzberger stated, “You better believe it. A lot of our people don’t deserve the prizes they’ve won and we know it.”
In response to the announcement, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s heirs issued a written statement which read, in total, “The Times? Oh yes, well, better late than never.”
Reached for comment by telephone at his Stanford University office, Mr. Conquest, the internationally renown Soviet historian and author of numerous books on Soviet terror, stated tersely, “I told them so thirty years ago, those [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted].”
Mr. Conquest declined further comment.
Fine, you’re right about Cohen, but could you please stop harming your own credibility with statements like “if it acquires and uses a nuclear weapon on Israel as it has threatened to do”? Iran hasn’t done that. The closest it has come to doing that is when one of its politicians (Rafsanjani) speculated out loud about what kind of retaliatory capability Iran would possess if and when it gained a nuclear weapon, or when a different politician, actually in office (Ahmadinejad), has denied Israel’s right to exist and has predicted that it would cease to exist.
That’s all bad enough. What Iran really does and has done is bad enough, what numerous individual Iranians have said and probably say every day is bad enough, the overall situation is dire enough, but when you enter into the realm of paranoia and distortion, you simply play into their hands. If “Iran” were to make such an explicit threat, and the US and others failed to react, then I believe we would really have entered into a new phase in the world history and the political dynamic.
If I’m wrong, if there has been a declaration anywhere that justifies the referenced statement, someone please provide it, as I would love to be educated.
I have to sympathize with Cohen just a bit. Having been the guest of several dictatorial governments at various times, on visits that were, nominally, non-political, I note that totalitarian governments can be most remarkably nice to you when they want to be. And it takes some discipline to experience such favors without feeling the warm fuzzies for them. I have found myself thinking very nice things about some of the most despicable excuses for government ever devised by man, and needing a splash of cold water after getting home to come back to reality.
#1
That’s perfect. I’ve never seen the tone of the Times captured so well.
Reading this site has really opened my eyes about neo-cons. They sure seem to have much more loyalty to conservatism than to Israel. This site is nothing if not a complete refutation of the Israeli lobby argument. It is truly amazing that MR. Tobin isn’t aware of the irony in this article. The problem is when you start grading nations on a curve and focus on results rather than methods you get some surprising results.
Mr. Leiberman certainly owes his life to Stalin, as probably does Israel itself. Conservatives tired of being stuck with the reality of the being stuck with Hitler as a member of the right, have tried valiantly to turn Stalin into another Hitler. He certainly isn’t the pride of socialism, but Hitler he wasn’t.
Conservatives try to turn him into a genocidal figure for all those who starved in the chaos following the revolution. Certainly he bears an incredible blame for this. But it is impossible to blame every case of starvation on Stalin. Conservatives still blame communism for almost all of the ills of the former Soviet bloc. Under this rubric many of those deaths would have to be laid at the footsteps of the Monarchy. And, after all people were starving right here in the United States during the exact same time.
Sure there would probably be a lot more Ukrainians if Stalin had been stopped, but there may have been no more lives saved. Say what you will about Stalin’s five year plans, they did industrialize Russian on a scale unmatched by any other system. The Czar’s armies were a joke. Stalin faced down Hitler virtually alone.
If Stalin hadn’t industrialized Russia Hitler surely would have killed as many died in Stalin’s famines. And, virtually no European Jews would have survived. Of course he wasn’t doing to save the Jews, but don’t kid yourself non of the other Allied leaders cared about the Jews either.
In fact without Stalin’s Army it is almost inconceivable that America would joined the European theater. Pat Buchanan may be a pretty lonely conservative now, but he certainly wouldn’t have been in 1941. Go around to the old folk homes and talk to conservatives. You won’t have to go to many to here line and verse of “FDR lied and people died.”
If Israel is willing to survive with Lieberman’s sectarian, cleansing and that is what he is promoting, (The Arabs may have waved a couple of Hamas flags but they have hardly posed a threat warranting mass deportation), than you should at least give Stalin his due. He is after all the savior of European Jews, and therefore the true father of Israel.
Just to point out the obvious:
paragraph 2: “It was, as I previously wrote, straight out of the playbook of previous apologists for beastly regimes, such as those of the Nazis or the Soviets, who had gullible or ideologically sympathetic journalists flack for them.”
Paragraph 4: “Of course, no one said that Iran was the same thing as Nazi Germany, though if it acquires and uses a nuclear weapon on Israel as it has threatened to do, such analogies would cease being so far-fetched. ”
I largely agree with the point of this post, but when you contradict yourself in the span of three paragraphs, you kind of undermine your argument. Just sayin’…
Robert Lee,
are you competing with Cohen for a Duranty award?
Roger Cohen, 2ist century journalist and capo.
Nice work, Roger. Keep it up. Shmuck.
#1, williamssmith: “Soviet agent provocateur and Times reporter Walter Duranty.”
Yes: Duranty was not a “dupe”, as Mr. Tobin’s otherwise
fine article calls him. Duranty knew what he was doing.
He realized the truth about Stalin’s genocide and deliberately
misreported it.
I don’t know how this affects the comparison with Roger Cohen…
To #5: Robert, I know Putin is trying to rehab Stalin nowadays, but if the man of Steel didn’t bite the dust when he did, I don’t know if I’d be here writing. Stalin was already talking about liquidating “rootless cosmopolitans” (Communistspeak for Jews) and given a few more years, my family would probably have met the same fate as the Ukranian kulaks. I know you’re making a point specifically to WWII, but your line of reasoning will not lead to a good place. You are correct that the Soviets were instrumental in defeating Nazi Germany, but I think this was in spite of Stalin’s leadership rather than because of it.
Duranty was factually wrong. What of my original post is factually wrong? Don’t kid yourself, the fact that Lieberman won so many votes is not good news for Israel. If Israel strips large numbers of Arabs of their citizenship, it will hang around Israel like a millstone around Israel’s neck. It will be all that anyone ever remembers from time. No one will be writing about the suicide bombers or the rockets from Gaza. If mass deportations come it will vindicate the Arab position it will look to history as though the world gave Israel a better deal than any other people and that trust was betrayed.
I understand to the Jews the Holocaust is a unique moment in history and the state of Israel is sacrosanct. But to the rest of the world the Holocaust was just one of what seem to be steady string of genocides from the Soviet Union, to China, to Cambodia, to Rwanda to who ever is next. None of these people got anything from the world community. Israel will look to history as unique gift from the Ally powers who, were so complicit in Holocaust, to the Jews. If Israel engages in sectarian cleansing they will get much harsher treatment than, say the Iraqi Shiites, or even Saddam Husein himself. If Leiberman’s ideas are implemented Israel will be utterly and completely alone. And like the old communist, who struggle to explain the wonderful dream that Communism provided, Israeli citizens will have to explain how it wasn’t their fault everything went so horribly wrong. If you don’t believe me put on one of those big red Maple leaf jackets and hike around in Cajun country.
Roger Cohen is a fine lad from South Africa, having been bred during the Joe Slovo era of ANC communist influence. His Leftism is congenital. Anything good for the USA or Israel is bad, and vice versa.
The Arabs are occupied and oppressed by the mighty Jews, dont you know, who deny their civil liberties. Arabs and Moslems are just like us, only wanting a peaceful state of their very own.
If Iran has totalitarian islamofacism and antisemitism, its the fault of the perfidious Americans and the AIPAC-loving neo-cons. That Leiberman is a patriot and defender of Zionism is anathema and makes him an odious radical rabid right-wing racist.
Thats why the NYT hired him and pays him. Thats been his unflinching reliable position throughout his career. A committed man of the Left. What you see is what you get.
Mr. Shoshensky,
Point well taken. There is no hiding the fact that Stalin was murderous as was Lenin. It can’t be whitewashed, and it could have been much worse. I am glad you made it
Re: Mr. Hotchkiss’s rather anachronistic post (#5),
echoing Duranty and other Stalin apologists of the time :
/1/ Stalin’s famines did not help industrialize Russia:
that is absurd. They had the opposite effect, by
destroying Russia’s agriculture – which fed the
industrialization. Massive purges of engineers,
scientists, economists, administrators, and other personnel
delayed industrialization, too. Russia would have surely
been stronger and more industrialized by 1941 under
almost any other leadership than Stalin’s.
The Gulag swallowed the best; it later regurgitated
some – including, for example, Tupolev, the famous aircraft designer,
and Korolev, the future father of the Soviet
space program. Most disappeared irretrievably; e.g., when the
Katyusha rocket launcher proved it worth, its designer couldn’t
be rewarded – because he had already been shot – so, they
ascribed the authorship to another man and rewarded that one…
Because truth was another – and the most valuable – victim
of Stalin’s regime, which deceived itself as it lied to others.
/2/ Stalin’s policies – which, among other groups,
exterminated the Red Army’s commanding cadre –
did not help win WWII. On the contrary, they weakened the USSR –
to the point that that gigantic power barely won the war against
Finland; and so they encouraged Hitler to attack it.
As part of these policies, Stalin purged everyone who was preparing
for the defense of the country – because the idea of defense contradicted
his doctrine of offensive war – and so he had the existing lines of defense
fortifications demolished, and the personnel thathad been created
to organize resistance in case of an nvasion.
The new commanding officers were so demoralized that the Wehrmacht
met hardly any resistance in June 1941 – and its tanks (still inferior in
number) advanced with the maximum speed of which
their engines were capable of; while the Red Army fled,
abandoning its suprior equippment, and surrendered in millions.
Large numbers even enlisted to fight against their own enslaved country
(something that had never happened in Russia’s many previous wars).
All this, and much else of this kind, was a product of Stalin’s policies.
/3/ But before that, Stalin’s policies were instrumental in bringing Hitler
to power in Germany; and in helping him re-arm (help that continued
until the very day they went to war) – and in encouraging German aggression;
the two powers actually began WWII together in partitioning Poland.
Without Stalin’s polcies, there would have been no Nazi Reich;
no WWII; no Holocaust.
/4/ After dividing the spoils, the two allies fell apart – but Stalin deserves
exactly as much credit for fighting Hitler as Hitler deserves for
fighting Stalin. Some of the victims of each of the two monsters
escaped death through the conquests of the other.
Stalin’s plans to exterminate the Jews came to fruition later
than Hitler’s, and Stalin’s death interrupted them; but he had
already managed to murder many of them, including (e.g.)
the best-known Jewish writers; with the Doctors’ Plot,
he was busy priming the masses for his own
“final solution” – and he had already committed
acts of genocide against several other ethnic groups.
The moral equivalence between Stalin and Hitler is impeccable.
/5/ As for Avigdor Lieberman: there is nothing morally
dubious in his interesting proposals. A negotiated, voluntary
population exchange is a natural possibility when new
boundaries are drawn between sovereign entities created
on ethnic principles. Nothing wrong, in principle, with this idea.
/6/ Saying that “Arabs hardly posed a threat warranting
mass deportation” is misleading.
There are many Arabs; they differ; lumping them together like
this is unacceptable, it smacks of racism.
But as for Hamas and other Palestinian
Jihadists, they have threatened, not just deportation,
but extermination of the Jews. Their favorite Koranic
(perhaps apocryphal) quote is:
The remaining Jews will unsuccessfully attempt to hide, as the rocks and trees will expose them, calling out “there is a Jew behind me, kill him!”
Thank you, contra, for that expert dissection of what I take to be Mr Hotchkiss’s argument. I say “take to be” because I enjoyed a complete dinner a little while ago, and didn’t want to lose it while trying to finish his bizarrely convoluted argument and think of my own response.
I did not say the famines helped the industrialization. I am saying that the industrialization was effective. And those that say it could have been as effective, under any other leadership are being dishonest. The transformation of Russia’s economy was unique. Remember that before WWII, Japan had sunk Russia’s Pacific fleet. When the Czars troops fought in WWI there were so few guns that the soldiers had to wait for someone to die to get their turn.
There is a great dangerous fallacy in history to discount the achievements of bad people. Evil people or people who were incompetent, as Stalin was as so many things can still be amazingly competent at transforming an economy using propaganda and a police state to transform an economy.
Stalin may have intentions to carry out a final solution, but, he didn’t. Stalin is not Hitler. He is his own separate kind of evil.
There are many typos in my long #14 – sorry;
I am correcting a spot where this may affect understanding:
he had the existing lines of defense fortifications demolished, and
the personnel that had been prepared to organize resistance
in case of an invasion, arrested and liquidated.
Robert Lee,
O.K., O.K. I hereby bestow upon you the Walter Duranty Memorial Award and all the opprobium it entails, while Stephen Walt will have to settle for Honorable Mention. Are you happy now, comrade?
Quite frankly, it’s amazing that anybody kept reading your tripe after you claimed Hitler was a right-winger and Stalin won WWII, but I’m glad Contra did. His refutation of your pernicious drivel was very educational. Thanks for inspiring him.
I would only add the following salient points: Mr Hotchkiss does not know what he is talking about. He clearly has not a clue. He is also an apologist…an apologist for a monster who murdered 20 million people. His efforts to not “discount the achievements of bad people” is noteworthy but not to his credit.
Stalin’s industrialization was a pathetic failure. The only reasons that Stalin overcame the Nazi advance was because he was willing to use as cannon fodder millions of Soviet troops AND, the US supplied him, for the entire war, with MASSIVE amounts of weapons. Rifles, bullets, tanks and planes… we supplied the Soviets with the arms necessary to fight the Nazi’s.
On another note, Cohen’s award is completely appropriate, given Duranty’s actions. The only question is whether Cohen recognizes the irony of being given an award that celebrates a fundamentally dishonest and disloyal man. My guess is that the irony (and shame) completely escape him.
Lieberman is so misunderstood. Yes, alright, he did threaten to kill Arab parliamentarians, but that doesn’t make him a bad guy!
Contra: BRAVO!
“It was, as I previously wrote, straight out of the playbook of previous apologists for beastly regimes, such as those of the Nazis or the Soviets, who had gullible or ideologically sympathetic journalists flack for them.”
can you prove this? if not, he’s right it’s baseless slander. analogies are the weakest possible way to make an argument. iran is not russia of the 1930′s. therefore you are wrong on the face of it. further, irans jews are not being “liquidated” they are thriving. you have absolutely no proof for your false anaolgy to these eras in history. you are a propagandist, not a journalist. and not a very good propagandist as your magazines lack of profits and board full of bashers attests.
“Second, Lieberman is considered a bad guy because he wants to trade Arab regions of pre-1967 Israel for parts of the West Bank where Jews currently live within a putative Palestinian state. ”
that is one small part of the reason lieberman, who commentary refuses to cover out of FEAR and EMBARASSMENT, is considered a bad guy. another totally dishonest portrayal of the issue.
you think that’s the WHOLE story? that lieberman is considered a bad guy because of THAT. of course you don’t.
“As for his calls for loyalty pledges from Israeli Arabs (as well as non-Zionist Jews), again I may think such statements are counter-productive and unfair, but it is no worse than a number of things that have not only been proposed but implemented in other democracies at war.”
lol. there you have it folks. commentary OFFICIALLY defends lieberman.
See below my online comment to Roger Cohen’s most recent op-ed, which was “refused” by The New York Times, notwithstanding their purported policy that “comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive”:
Roger Cohen writes in “Iran, the Jews and Germany”: “One Iranian exile, no lover of the Islamic Republic, wrote to me saying that my account of Iran’s Jews had brought “tears to my eyes” because “you are saying what many of us would like to hear.” Foolish me, I always thought that journalism was more than telling people what they “would like to hear.”
Questions: When you wrote “What Iran’s Jews Say”, with how many Iranian Jews did you speak? Who selected these Jews for you? Did you speak with them via an interpreter? (Fess up, Roger, you don’t speak Farsi.) And when you spoke with them, who was present? (I have met and spoken with many Iranian Jews who fled Iran, and their descriptions of their former life differ in the extreme from your account.)
But more important, Roger, after a month in Iran, what about closure? Your message, as I understand it: “Indulge” Iran and cut them some slack as they pursue their nuclear plans, notwithstanding Khamenei’s potentially apocalyptic intentions; after all, young Iranians like Nikes, and I’m a Jew and was treated royally there. But haven’t you forgotten something? As I see it, there’s still unfinished business, i.e. the Baha’is, Iran’s largest religious minority, whose desperate plight must not be ignored. I think you owe it as a journalist to tell their story.
Yes, I know: Tucked away in a prior op-ed is the single sentence: “Among minorities, the Baha’i — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.” Is that all you have to say? You didn’t happen to ask to meet with the seven? Why not? Several readers’ online comments requested additional information about the Iranian Baha’i community, but you didn’t oblige, so allow me to assist:
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution “only” 13 Jews have been executed by Iran on the grounds of spying for Israel. In comparison, more than 200 Baha’is have been cruelly butchered during the same period. Why do Jews get “preferred treatment”? Simple: Judaism and Christianity are deemed predecessors to Islam, and both Moses and Christ are legitimate prophets; however, Mohammed is for some Muslims the ultimate and final messenger, whose precepts require no elaboration and tolerate no deviation. Although Judaism and Christianity are “not fully evolved”, they nevertheless paved the way for Islam, and Jews and Christians, although inferior, can on some level be suffered. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century, more than 1,200 years after the death of Mohammed, Bahá’u’lláh, Baha’i’s founder, appeared on the scene in Persia, and the Baha’i faith, which embraces Bahá’u’lláh, as opposed to Mohammed, as God’s latest manifestation, constitutes heresy for Iran’s ayatollahs.
The result: Tens of thousands of Baha’is have been slaughtered in Iran from the time this religion emerged. The most recent murder occurred in July 1998, when Rúhullah Rawhani, a Baha’i businessman and father of four, was executed in Mashad without sentencing and without any semblance of due process.
Concerning the seven imprisoned Baha’is you so casually mentioned in your last op-ed written from Iran, a 22 February 2009 VOA editorial “reflecting the views of the United States Government” (http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/2009-02-23-voa5.cfm) states:
“More than 9 months have passed since 7 leaders of the Baha’i community in Iran were arrested and sent to prison with no access to legal counsel. Now the Iranian government has announced the 7 have been charged with espionage. The move is the latest in decades of repressive measures against the Baha’is, the largest non-Islamic religious minority group in Iran. Those measures include barring Baha’is from attending public universities or working in public agencies, destroying or closing Baha’i places of worship, bulldozing Baha’i cemeteries, legally confiscating Baha’i property, and killing Baha’is with impunity.” [Item by item, doesn't this bring back memories from some 70 years ago?]
I would also add that among the aspects of the Baha’i faith most rankling to Iran’s Shiite majority is its advocacy of women’s rights. For a personal harrowing account of the depths of brutal oppression experienced by an Iranian Baha’i woman, read an interview with Ms. Mehri Mavaddat (http://info.Bahai.org/article-1-8-3-15.html).
Roger, you would have us know that “Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.” I suggest you examine Iranian “civility” toward its gentle Baha’i minority before pronouncing judgment. More to the point, go back and try writing an op-ed “What Iran’s Baha’is Say”. I am confident “the consistent warmth” (your description) with which you were received in Iran by this savage theocracy will dissipate with the speed of a uranium enriching centrifuge.
I am surprised that it must be pointed out, but now matter how bad you think Iran is, it is in no way comparable to the Soviet Union or even Saddam Husein’s Iraq. There simply have not been mass killings. Killings yes, but not mass slaughter. The problem with Iraq is its strategic power, which derives almost completely from the destruction of Iraq, though the war in Lebanon turned out spectacularly well for Iran as well.
Guess what? Roger’s op-ed, “What Iran’s Jews Say”, now appears in the Tehran Times: http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=189975
Guess what they omitted from the NYT op-ed:
“I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.
Among minorities, the Bahai — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.”
so does commentary think ALL jews are liars and cowards or just the iranian ones?
Robert Lee,
Stalin only wanted to murder Jews in Russia, not every Jew on the planet, and he did not export terrorism internationally. During the Iran/Iraq war, unarmed Iranian children were forced to serve as cannon fodder by the mullahs.
Iran under the mullahs is every bit as evil, depraved and despicable as the Soviet Union and Iraq ever were.
Iran’s strategic power is implied only, because it does NOT control the Persian Gulf, it does NOT produce more oil than its Arab neighbors and it does NOT control Hamas or Hizb’allah. As for its desire to use nuclear blackmail against its neighbors and the rest of the world, the new Israeli government will have something demonstrative to say about that.
As a former subscriber to the Times who refused to continue reading its jaundiced (putting it mildly) coverage of Israeli events which always turned into aberrational “man bites dog” type of coverage -where it seemed that nothing in Israel was normal whether civil, cultural, religous or military -it is not surprising that Roger Cohen is the Duranty award recipient. From the reporter who created all the news that fit the NY Times under the Stalin regime to the publishers who could not bring themselves to report on what was going on inside the Nazi regime when it came to the Jews what more can be said other than what the record shows except: “all the news that fits we print”. The real folly is that no self-respecting Jew should be buying the Times today for the shill of anti-Israeli reportage cant that it has become.
Roger Cohen’s report of how good the Jews have it in Iran is tantamount to a report on how they are second class citizens in a country where most of their co-religionists have fled the wrath of the Islamists. Imagine if Cohen reported on blacks or any minority living in the US under these conditions of second class citizenship- the Times would erupt on its OpEd page as it has already done so with the second class status of secular Iranian women. Duranty’s legacy lives on in the marrow of the Times and I for one choose not to pay for the this miscarriage of journalism.
Damn!! Pick up a rock, and under it we’ll find another self-hating Jew!