Sometimes, You Need An Italian For a 'Hit' Job

Hat's off to James Taranto (which, for an observant Jew like me, is a mighty compliment but, sinc e I've actually met the gentleman in question, I feel more comfortable with him rather than fellow-tribist Cohen)) who socks it to Roger Cohen:

...Iran does not now have a nuclear weapon. Therefore, Cohen infers, the Israelis fabricated the threat back then, and are doing so again: "Now here comes [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, . . . spinning the latest iteration of Israel's attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil."

...Cohen asserts that "Israeli hegemony" over America "is proving a kind of slavery," a statement so ugly that we are surprised it got into print.

...Is the whole world crying wolf as well? Or have the Israelis managed to fool everyone except Roger Cohen into taking seriously a threat they know is phony?

Here is where things get even more complicated. If, as Cohen suggests, the Israelis are perpetrating a fraud by claiming that Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to Israel, they are doing so with a lot of help from the Iranian regime. No one would believe Israel were it not for Tehran's eliminationist rhetoric and its open pursuit of nuclear arms...

...Cohen vigorously disputes Netanyahu's characterization of the Iranian regime as a "messianic apocalyptic cult." According to Cohen, "Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs." But one important "scrap of evidence" is, to put it mildly, hard to square with this evaluation--namely, the fact that Iran persists in acting like a messianic apocalyptic cult...

According to this analysis, when Iranian rulers lead mobs in chants of "Death to Israel!" or talk of wiping the Jewish state from the map, their intent is not threatening but hortatory. Iran's "scurrilous anti-Israel tirades" are meant in the same spirit as Cohen's own anti-Israel columns: merely to criticize Israel for doing bad things and encourage it to behave better...

...to sum up, Cohen is asking us to believe that Iran's threats against Israel are both insincere and well-intended, and that Israel's leaders know this but are cynically pretending otherwise in order to preserve their "hegemony" over America. Is this more plausible than to think that the Israelis sincerely view the Iranian regime as a threat, and that maybe, in fact, it is a threat?

As for the boy who cried wolf, Cohen seems to have forgotten how the story ends. The last time the boy cries wolf, there is a wolf.