Nir Rosen, the journalist who infamously mocked Lara Logan (and who was completely dismantled by Anderson Cooper last night), has been saying hugely outrageous things for years, as I've documented here. He is sympathetic to the Taliban; he thinks al Qaeda poses no threat to America; he wishes Americans would "get over" 9/11; and he thinks Israel is an "abomination" that should be destroyed. After I posted about his previous statements, I was flooded with e-mails from Goldblog readers who told me I missed the nuttiest thing Rosen ever said. It came in an article about his Israeli origins, in which he called his homeland a place of "bloody nationalism, paranoid identity and violent religion." In reading this treatise on Israel and its sins, it becomes clear that Rosen (who attended an Orthodox Jewish day school in New York) feels the sort of hate for Israel and Judaism that one associates with the hardest core of Hamas.
The truly revealing part of this treatise comes at the end, when Rosen discusses ways to convince Israel to behave in a way he thinks is just: "I find myself in the unique and painful position of calling for international sanctions against Israel and wondering if a punitive bombing of Tel Aviv, the city I love, until it complies with international law, might be a good (albeit quixotic) idea."
Yes, Rosen is calling for the physical destruction of the world's largest Jewish city. I wrote yesterday that I would try to avoid armchair psychoanalysis in this matter, but sometimes these things are fairly obvious. Rosen, an American of Israeli origin, has spent his career rationalizing the actions of Israel's, and America's, most bitter enemies, and he envisions a day when the world community will conduct a bombing campaign of Tel Aviv. Nir Rosen seems to be engaged in a ferocious attempt to shed his identity to the point where he aligns himself with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Taliban, and argues for the literal destruction of the city from which he came. It is deeply pathetic.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
