Israel Matzav

Kapo Cohen says Israel cries wolf

It's perhaps appropriate that on the first day of Passover, the day on which the Jewish people departed from Egyptian slavery, the New York Times, which still claims to be America's newspaper of record, publishes an op-ed by purported Jew Roger Kapo Cohen, in which he claims that Israel is crying "wolf" about Iran (Hat Tip: Memeorandum). I say it's appropriate because the kapo - the Jew who cooperates with the enemy who torments his fellow Jews - is a persona that long precedes Nazi Germany. One of the reasons that the Jews merited being redeemed from Egypt was that the people the Egyptians thought would be their kapos - the nogsim - refused to cooperate with the Egyptian masters, and were themselves flogged rather than incriminate their brethren.

But Cohen, about whom we say at the seder table ilu haya sham lo haya nigal (if he had been there, he would not have been redeemed), is now accusing Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of crying "wolf" about Iran, as if the fact that Netanyahu and his political rivals like Shimon Peres (who occupies a special place in Cohen's delusional world) agree on the danger that Iran poses constitutes some sort of sinister plot designed to prevent 'peace' from breaking out in the Middle East.

Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.

A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.

What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time....

The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.

The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.

I must be missing something. If Cohen is so enamored with Iran, why does he admit that they are a 'repressive regime'? Why is he apparently concerned that they not 'go nuclear'? After all, if Iran is really as nice as Cohen claims it is, do we really need to worry about them having nuclear weapons? If Iran is so civilized, why does even Cohen call the regime 'repressive'? Could it be that he's motivated for hatred for Israel and that deep down even he knows that Israel is not crying "wolf"?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:46 PM