The New York Times journalist Roger Cohen, who recently has published controversial articles against Israel, wrote on Sunday an article warmly praising Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan for stating, “Hamas must be represented at the negotiating table. Only then can you get a solution.”
Cohen said that the Turkish leader told him, "You will get nowhere by talking only to [Mahmoud] Abbas,” referring the chairman of the Palestinian Authority. “This is what I tell our Western friends.”
The journalist called Turkey “Israel’s best friend in the Muslim Middle East.”
Cohen recently drew severe criticism for articles in which he dismissed charges that Iran is comparable with Nazi Germany, attacked Israel’s new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for “hateful ultranationalist rhetoric” and promoted the view that Hamas and Hizbullah are "organizations now entrenched [as] political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible."
Cohen’s latest article, published in The Times on Sunday, stated that “Hamas is seen throughout the region as a legitimate resistance movement, a status burnished by its recent inconclusive pounding during Israel’s wretchedly named — and disastrous — ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in Gaza.”
Writing about his interview with Erdogan, Cohen said that the Turkish Prime Minister “earned hero’s status in the Arab world when he walked out on the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a debate earlier this year in Davos” following Operation Cast Lead.
Prime Minister Erdogan explained that if he had not walked out, “It would have been disrespectful toward myself and disrespectful of the thousands of victims against whom disproportionate force was being used.”
Cohen’s opinion article predicted that President Obama, who now is visiting Turkey, is promoting a “new realism” that will improve relations with the Muslim world and “will lead to tensions with Israel, which had conveniently conflated its long national struggle with the Palestinians within the war on terror.”