Roger Cohen - Backwards Again

The NYTimes' Roger Cohen interviewed Turkey's Prime Minister, the 'walk-out-on-Shimon-Peres' Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Cohen makes it clear on whose side he's on:

How Hamas is viewed is a pivotal issue in the current American Middle East policy review. The victor in 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas is seen throughout the region as a legitimate resistance movement, a status burnished by its recent inconclusive pounding during Israel’s wretchedly named — and disastrous — “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.

The United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization. They won’t talk to it until it recognizes Israel, among other conditions. This marginalization has led only to impasse because Hamas, as an entrenched Palestinian political and social movement, cannot be circumvented and will not disappear.

Well, so we just let evil grow and grow and grant it legitimization and Hamas will, what? Stop it's violence? Halt its educational ideology of suicide terror? Stop indoctrinating the youth of Gaza and perhaps, later, Judea and Samaria?

On the plus side, incidentally, Erdogan, we learn likes Obama's name:

“I consider personally the election of Barack Hussein Obama to have very great symbolic meaning. A Muslim and a Christian name — so in his name there is a synthesis, although people from time to time want to overlook that and they do it intentionally. Barack Hussein Obama.”

But Cohen can't let up on Israel:-

...Israel, which had conveniently conflated its long national struggle with the Palestinians within the war on terror...

"Conveniently"?

Or, perhaps, finally the world realises that the terror directed at Israel and Zionism and Jews since 1920, led by the religious - not political - leader the Grand Mufti, when both then and in 1929, hordes with swords came pouring out of the Haram E-Sharif, aka The Temple Mount, to slaughter Jews, and kept it up through the 1930s, then after 1947, then the fedayeen, then the Fatah and then the Hamas, that it is the Islamists who have conveniently conflated their religious ideology with the national struggle of Jews.

I guess Cohen being a Brit may be a partial explanation of his warped rational of thinking.