Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post
on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy
for the Israeli government.
“Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that
proportionality is madness,” he wrote. “For Israel, a small country
within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any
enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is
suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good
enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to
reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.”
Cohen likes to sit in front of a computer and use flip phrases
like “punch out your lights” as euphemisms for burning human flesh and
bones with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.
In mid-November 1998, when President Clinton canceled plans for
air attacks on Iraq after Saddam Hussein promised full cooperation with
U.N. weapons inspectors, Cohen wrote: “Something is out of balance
here. The Clinton administration waited too long to act. It needed to
punch out Iraq’s lights, and it did not do so.”
The resort to euphemism tells us a lot. So does Cohen’s track
record of sweeping statements on behalf of his zeal for military
actions funded by the U.S. Treasury.
On February 6, 2003, the Washington Post published Richard Cohen’s
judgment the morning after Colin Powell made his televised presentation
to the U.N. Security Council. “The evidence he presented to the United
Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely
bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not
only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a
doubt still retains them,” Cohen wrote. “Only a fool -- or possibly a
Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise.”
Cohen’s moral certainties are on a par with his technical ones.
While he condemns rockets fired into Israel, he expresses pleasure
about missiles fired by the Israeli government. That the death toll of
civilians is far higher from Israel’s weaponry does not appear to
bother him. On the contrary, he seems glad about the killing spree by
the Israeli military.
In a column with bigoted overtones (“Israel is, as I have often
said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood”),
Cohen’s eagerness to support additional large-scale bombing by Israel
is thematic. Consider this passage: “Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran
and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed
suicide bomber over the border -- all that is needed is the requisite
amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it’s either stupid
or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure
that babies don’t die in their cribs and old people in the streets is
to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no
matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very
steep price.”
Such phrasing is classic evasion by keyboard cheerleaders for war:
“The” Lebanese. “The” Palestinians. “They will pay a very, very steep
price.” Meanwhile, in the real world, the vast majority of the victims
of the Israeli onslaught are civilians being subjected to collective
punishment.
Cohen -- like so many others in the American punditocracy --
depicts the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and
important than the death of an Arab civilian.
There’s something really sick about such righteous support for
civilian death and destruction.
Osama bin Laden, meet Richard Cohen.
Richard, meet Osama.
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Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” was published in paperback this
summer. For information, go to:
www.normansolomon.com