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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Useful Idiot

This has to be one of the most willfully obtuse screeds to litter the NYT in quite some time, and considering the roster of chuckleheads who poop out filler for them on a reg'lar basis, that really is saying something. Certainly the Arab world, as a whole, needs to do a better job in weeding out the regressive nutballs in their backyards, but for one, Persians are not Arabs.

Cohen seems blessedly ignorant of any possibility why some inhabitants of that part of the world, after a couple straight centuries of varying levels of colonialism, might tend to assume the worst of the US and Israel. The question is not that it might sound preposterous that the Mossad would have remote-controlled sharks attacking people at Sharm el-Shaikh; it does sound preposterous. But only because sharks, insofar as we know, cannot be lowjacked and utilized as remote-kill devices, not because there's no way Israel -- who, let's recall, just a few months ago sent two dozen agents into a Gulf State hotel to whack someone, pissing off several countries' diplomatic corps with their counterfeiting of passports -- would ever do such a thing.

It's as if this guy, not even sixty years later, has never heard of, say, Kermit Roosevelt.

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