Now that Richard Cohen is getting some attention here at dKos, due to his recent column in the Washington Post which notes that the pastor of Barack Obama's church has a daughter who works at a magazine that once gave an award to Louis Farrakhan, I thought it would be instructive to present a little background on this writer.
Cohen attended Hunter College. I note from a Google search that Hunter College has something called the Palestine Club. It's impossible to be sure, without actually bothering to look it up, what the Palestine Club does, but it's certainly true that many people in Palestine dislike Israel. Some of them even engage in acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians.
I should mention right off that no one has ever conclusively linked Richard Cohen to any acts of violence. To all outward appearances, Cohen is a U.S.-based journalist who has never been positively identified as the man who set off a car bomb at a Tel Aviv shopping center, slaying six. These sorts of things are always difficult to prove.
I would also hasten to add that Cohen has never been conclusively shown to be a Holocaust denier. It's certainly worth noting, however, that I have never read the phrase, "The Holocaust definitely happened" in any of his columns, nor has he ever telephoned me to say, "Hey, Frank-- you know the Holocaust? Totally real." This is a troubling gray area in the life of this shadowy media figure, a question that nothing short of actual research can answer.
Cohen is a professor Columbia University, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was recently invited to speak. Did Cohen himself advocate this invitation as part of a complex jihadist propaganda strategy designed to force your daughters to wear burqhas and swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden? We just don't know.
We do know that last year there was a media report that Iranian Jews would be forced to wear gold stars, as they did in Nazi Germany. We also know that this report later turned out to be false, but that alone does not prove that Richard Cohen doesn't plan to set up a nationwide system of homosexual madrassas where all children will be forced to write left-handed and ingest the date-rape drug GHB. The jury is still out.
Like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer before their arrests, Richard Cohen is presumed by his neighbors and coworkers to be a normal, law-abiding citizen. No media reports have surfaced of Cohen killing children, attending black masses or engaging in unnatural sex acts with beasts of the field. However, as a journalist, he almost certainly knows something about Afghanistan, knowledge that would come in handy for anyone masterminding the world's largest heroin cartel.
It's just difficult to know where this fog of a man stands. Or slinks. Or something.