Roger Cohen, in the streets

Two readers have already passed along Roger Cohen's startling account of participation in the Tehran protests yesterday, during which Cohen retreats to an alley to escape gassing and barely suppresses his thrill at being part of this democratic history-making. Two quick thoughts:
–Cohen is today vying to replace Jeffrey Goldberg as the most important Jewish journalist in the United States, and doing so from an oppositional stance. He is not competing on Goldberg's ground, the access-journalist, but as a universalist in the streets, awakened by Gaza to the bankrupt neocon/Zionist ideology about the Muslim world. And I would guess that Cohen has a solid following among Obama/J Street Jews.
–The thrill in reading Cohen is his complete identification with the brave, thoughtful resisters in the Tehran streets. This is a movement that draws on Obama's victory to imagine a radically-different future of global interaction. And very little separates Cohen's identification from Max Blumenthal's identification with the West Bank protesters. That's next.