DON'T BLAME ISLAM, ROGER COHEN

ROGER COHEN INCITES HATRED

Roger Cohen, NY Times columnist...should know better. In his article "Islam and the West at War" (February 16, 2015 ) he dumps on the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, blaming the inevitable results of the West's imperialistic incursions into the Middle East in search of oil and and resources on the very victims of those destructive and persistent policies. In this wrongheaded piece, Mr. Cohen, perhaps blinded by his own biases, had the chutzpa to use the same kind of generalizations, half truths, false history and innuendo to support his thesis that others have used against his coreligionists for centuries.

Mr. Cohen ignores the five to six hundred-thousand Muslims killed during the Bush-Obama wars against Islam since 9-11, the millions displaced from their homes to become refugees in other lands, the thousand blown to bits by drone strikes, the torture, the renditions, the utter destruction and chaos visited upon their nations, cities and lands. Mr. Cohen ignore these facts and blames the victims. He finds Islam guilty of the following: "Over the more than 13 years since Al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, we have seen trains blown up in Madrid, the Tube and a bus bombed in London, Western journalists beheaded, the staff of Charlie Hebdo slaughtered, Jews killed in France and Belgium and now Denmark. This is not the work of a “dark ideology” but of jihadi terror." I do not mean to present a "numbers" argument here, like "who is worse than whom?". But It is apparent that Mr. Cohen is comparing a pimple on his butt with fatal lung cancer.

Mr. Cohen's assault, on Islam, scribbled from his powerful perch above Times Square is just the kind of journalism which can incite the uninformed and be responsible for hate crimes here at home, such as the recent murder of three innocent American Muslim students just witnessed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Perhaps if columnists of a stature like Roger Cohen, would tell the story as it really is...we might one day be able to reign in the radical elements on both sides of the "Ninth Crusade" and find peace again.