Wolpe: Cohen Came, Listened, Learned Nothing

Rabbi David Wolpe has posted his version of Roger Cohen's visit on The Huffington Post:

The audience tried over and over again to convince Cohen that while he was partly right - the Iranian people were sophisticated, poetry loving, freedom loving people, they were also people many of whom (particularly their leaders) were in the grip of a terrifying ideology. The government sponsors the production of the "protocols of the Elders of Zion" the anti-Semitic forgery that has done more harm than any other. They negotiated five years with the European Union in return five more years to build a nuclear program. The relentless persecution of the Bahai, which came up several times in the evening, shows the face of a regime that claims homosexuals do not exist, that Muslim lives (according to law) are worth more than others, that non-Muslims carry impurities, that women's status is degraded - on and on these Iranian Jews pleaded that Cohen acknowledge that his reading was partial at best, dangerous at worst.