In a NY synagogue, Roger Cohen demolishes neoconservative Bret Stephens

It may not be going too far to say that New York Times columnist Roger Cohen fell in love with the people of Iran during his lengthy visits earlier this year. He met noble, intelligent, and independent people, whose civilization affected him "deeply"– as he says it affects anyone who spends time there. Running through clouds of teargas during the political crisis of June, he seems to have made a complete identification with the protesters’ spirit, and have vowed to defend these people against all prejudice in the west.

That is the only conclusion I can make from the impassioned performance that Cohen gave last night at the Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side of New York. To a crowd of aging Jews–at least it looked that way, the men were all asked to wear yarmulkes, including Cohen, who’d come bareheaded–who were demanding a militant no-brainer to the evening’s question, "Can Iran Be Stopped?" Cohen brought only compassion, and in doing so stomped the callow neoconservative with whom he was pitted. And he was actually applauded for doing so.

It’s nice sometimes to think how far we’ve come in a year, and last night was one of those nights. The evening was sponsored by the friends of Tel Aviv University, whose glossy propaganda about Jewish minds being Israel’s chief export was set out on the pews. Neocon Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal wore the yarmulke he’d come in with and was seated closest to the Israeli flag on the altar, and Jewish Week editor Gary Rosenblatt introduced the discussion by describing Iran as an aggressive spreader of Islam. But Cohen spoke first and promptly dashed Rosenblatt with realist cold-water. Iran may be “media enemy #1,” but the reality is more complex. It’s not a monolithic society. It’s highly-educated and "thirsting" for engagement with the west. The face of Iran is not the mullah with a beard and his finger on the trigger but the “beautiful face” of Neta, who was shot down during the protests last June.

I thought Cohen might lay low in this audience. No, his face flushed as he ran over his assigned five minutes, ignoring Rosenblatt’s officious mumbles, urging us to get past the ”psychosis” of 30 years of bad relations with Iran.

You pretty much could have ended the panel then. For the rest of the night Stephens slung neoconservative cant about Islamofascism at Cohen, and each time Cohen took him on, sometimes interrupting him. Well, no society is monolithic, Stephens said. Actually many societies have been monolithic, Cohen said. North Korea, Iraq under Saddam, Nazi Germany– all monolithic.

After the election crisis– Stephens again– Obama should have refused to deal with the president of Iran and only talked with the Supreme Leader, recognizing his legitimacy not Ahmadinejad’s. “Oh come on Bret,” Cohen said. If Obama had refused to talk to Ahmadinejad that would have done it for any negotiations between us and Iran, and it is essential that we talk to these people.

And when Stephens compared Iran to Nazi Germany, not once but twice, Cohen bridled, and stuffed him. “Bret makes the very tired analogy,” and it gives a “false impression of Iran.” It is not a totalitarian state, it is repressive. But this sort of analogy poisons western minds.

John Mearsheimer has said, what is the point of palavering with bullies, they should be taken on fiercely, and last night Cohen showed the way. Before long Stephens was cowed. Between crowdpleasing spurts of neoconservative religion about using force to stop this regime from getting a bomb, you could see him start deferring to the far more intelligent and subtle man just down the table. At one point Stephens said, "If I may—" and asked a question of Cohen as one, and Stephens made this allowance, who had actually been there.

The political mood that Cohen created in the synagogue was that it would be insane to attack Iran. There is less than a 10 percent chance of it happening, he said. It will destroy Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world. He won’t allow it.

But the strongest impression of the evening was the power of Cohen’s having been there and now bearing witness in a synagogue. Even the neocon gave way. Cohen was politicized on the streets of Tehran, if not radicalized, scales fell from his eyes. He spoke dreamily of what would have happened if Moussavi had doubled down in the first few days, when he had 3 million in the streets and the regime had no idea how to respond. Could they have swept away their leaders in a reprise of the constitutional revolution of 1906–"finally realizing the centennial dream.”

Dreaming with the Iranians, here was the embodiment of a universalist intellectual Jew, expressing profound respect for other cultures. “We’ve been traumatized,” Cohen said. For 444 days back in ‘79-80, Walter Cronkite beamed images of the hostages taken by the Iranian revolutionaries and what did that produce but "poison" and “trauma.” The mirror image holds for the Iranians, who remember the CIA removing Mossadegh in 1953. “There are deep traumas between our countries.”

There was no answer to Cohen. He’d broken the spell. Through Rosenblatt’s inadvertent orchestration, Cohen was given the last word as he was given the first, and the old people who wanted fire and brimstone left disappointed.

Going there. Cohen’s performance was a reminder of how much power our side can get from human interchange: going to the West Bank, going to Gaza. Meeting the Palestinians there and in the U.S. Seeing them too as a deeply civilized people. Roger Cohen has not done that work, he has avoided it, he has respected the orthodoxies. His latest piece on Israel/Palestine forcibly refuses to look at the situation through the eyes of a humiliated, dispossessed people whom he might also find noble if he only extended himself. The traumas and psychoses in Israel/Palestine are larger than those between the U.S. and Iran, and, underwritten by privileged American Jewry, will take a lot more work to do. Of course the synagogues have not invited the Jewish witnesses to talk about it. Someday they will.

Related posts:

1. Neocon holdovers want NYT to fire Roger Cohen for uttering fair statements about Jews in Iran
2. Roger Cohen now getting ’self-hater’ label (maybe we should call it a star?)
3. Roger Cohen, in the streets
4. Reading the Roger Cohen-Marty Peretz exchange
5. Neoconservative Found Alive but Delirious in Cave in Lower Manhattan