While Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn promotes himself as a “progressive”, the limits of his progressivism are apparent whenever it comes to the issue of Palestine. Cohn has long enjoyed a certain level of legitimacy as a reliable interpreter of events–in the Middle East especially–by highlighting his 11 years working as chief of the Middle East and Asia bureaus—though, mysteriously—his profile in the Toronto Star is unclear on how long he served in the former.
As it turns out, Cohn only spent four years in the Middle East, a factoid he inadvertently revealed during a January 2024 appearance as founder and host of the Democracy Forum at Toronto Metropolitan University. Capitalizing on his progressive bona fides, Cohn has repeatedly expressed racist, progressive-except-for-Palestine dog whistles to the public for the past year and a half.
In his Oct. 18, 2024 column “Hamas leaders have been killed before, and the movement lives on. This time is surely different”, Cohn engaged in a particularly disgusting form of Zionist genocide apologia masked as geopolitical commentary. He assigns blame for the destruction of Gaza on Hamas, its “gift to Gazans”, rather than Israel, which has dropped all the bombs that destroyed Gaza, and the Western states, which have supplied the murder weapons. Cohn repeats the lie about “the massacre of 1,200 Israelis…mostly civilians” in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, ignoring the fact that most Israelis have undergone mandatory military training and service in which they have abused and killed Palestinians, and the role the Hannibal Directive had in killing large numbers of Israelis.
He justifies Israel’s genocide by claiming that the Oct. 7 attacks—erasing the context of 16 years of the siege on Gaza and 76 years of Zionist colonization—had “created the conditions for self-eradication”. Self-eradication, folks. A truly callous, ahistorical statement particularly given the history of armed Jewish resistance to anti-semitic oppression. If this same characterization was ever made of Jews who rose up against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, it would rightly be considered antisemitic. Yet, Cohn blaming the Palestinians for their genocide is perfectly acceptable in the pages of the Toronto Star. (more...)
Can Martin Regg Cohen write about Palestine with any integrity?
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