Nir Rosen is an acclaimed journalist whose extensive reporting from the war in Iraq has earned him many academic honors -- including fellowships with New York University’s Center on Law and Security and the New American Foundation and an invitation to speak before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His two books, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (alternatively titled The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter’s Journey into Occupied Iraq) and Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World; his long-form writings for the Boston Review, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone; and his interviews with Democracy Now! all offer conventional leftist takes on American foreign policy.
But he’s received acknowledgement from wider circles for the scoops and hard-to-beat insider access he managed to get while embedded with insurgents in Gaza: The Weekly Standard wrote that “he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter.” That access was enabled by Rosen’s fluent Arabic, olive skin, and perhaps also his sympathies -- as The Weekly Standard concluded in the same article, “No wonder Rosen has such great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency. He’s on their side.” Liberals widely condemned that line as intellectual McCarthyism. Whether or not Rosen actively sympathizes with terrorists, it’s clear from his own writing that he does view America as an exceptionally evil imperialist occupier.
#ad#That may be why he could little sympathize with American outrage over the September 11 attacks. In an interview with the English-language outlet Russia Today, Rosen said, “In terms of the deaths of 3,000 people, they were tragic, and they were sad.#...#But the real impact was in our reaction to it -- the hysterical nationalism, the increase in the national-security state, the reduction in civil liberties that followed.#...#That wasn’t necessary after the deaths of 3,000 people in a nation of 300 million.”
Ten years after 9/11, he wrote on Twitter that he found it hard to “disagree with much of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan Statement Regarding The Anniversary Of The 9/11 Event.”
One of the main themes of his writing and public appearances is that the U.S. has wildly overestimated the threats al-Qaeda poses to the U.S. When asked by Russia Today what threat al-Qaeda poses to the U.S., he replied, “Zero. Absolutely zero.” He claims to have met with al-Qaeda members, whom he describe as backwards idiots who “don’t know how to operate a Western toilet.” The belief that al-Qaeda poses a serious threat to America, he claims, is motivated by anti-Islamic prejudice.
He believes that Islamist violence in the Arab world is a natural response to American imperialism: “You still have that physical force and the threat of violence,” he told Democracy Now! “Indeed, I think we’re actually a failure as an empire. We actually managed to make the Taliban look good. We took the most detested regime in the world, the Taliban, removed them in a matter of weeks, and here, seven, eight years later, they’re more popular than ever.”
Rosen has a profound hatred for Israel: Its existence is a “blight unto the nations,” and he hopes to “speed its demise.” Though he manages a calm tone in anti-Israel polemics in major publications, his Facebook posts about Israel are more in this style: “i have always opposed israel and supported anybody who is opposed to israel. just as anybody concerned with justice and freedom must” and, “israel's existence is an abomination,” and, most poetically, “[f***] Israel.” He has even welcomed the prospect of a “third intifada.”
In other words, his pathological hatreds -- which made him incapable of sympathizing with a rape victim because of her politics -- have been on display throughout his career.
— Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.
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