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Ben Cohen. Credit: Courtesy.

Ben Cohen

Featured Columnist

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of FDD’s rapid response outreach, specializing in global antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Middle East/European Union relations. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.

Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) in 2018. Credit: Christopher Dilts via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
A ‘Palestine-firster’ scandal comes to the US Congress
It’s painfully obvious that no American interest is served by the adoption of anti-Israel positions on the part of an elected representative at the behest of an outside adviser who calls the shots.
Feb. 4, 2022
Ben Cohen
Caricatures of the late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat in the new Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah, January 2022. Source: Twitter/Khaled Abu Toameh.
Featured Columnist
What the row over caricatures of Yasser Arafat tells us about Palestinian politics
Anything other than uncritical veneration of their political leaders is regarded with suspicion—or worse.
Jan. 28, 2022
Ben Cohen
Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s vice president for economic development. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Iranian AMIA fugitive is feted by Latin America’s far-left
Mohsen Rezaei, a fugitive from terrorism charges who can be legitimately arrested in any country where he arrives, continues to travel the world as a representative of the theocracy he has faithfully served throughout his career.
Jan. 14, 2022
Ben Cohen
Protesters attend a demonstration against vaccines in Belgium. Credit: Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock.
Featured Columnist
Has the time come to bribe the unvaccinated?
The poisoning of our society’s discourse with pseudo-scientific claims and conspiracy theories—often rooted in medieval prejudices about Jews—is destroying trust in education, in government and worst of all, in each other.
Jan. 7, 2022
Ben Cohen
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo by Gil Corzo/Shutterstock.
Featured Columnist
Russia and China’s war on the past
Those in control of the present have driven a bulldozer through the recent past in a blatant attempt to obliterate the historical record of democratic struggles in both nations — and all in the service of a decidedly non-democratic future.
Dec. 31, 2021
Ben Cohen
An illustration of the future. Credit: Shutterstock/atk work.
Featured Columnist
2021: Past, present and future
We cannot prevent the cycles of history from returning to batter us with the same discredited tropes, but we can prepare ourselves more astutely.
Dec. 17, 2021
Ben Cohen
Deutsche Welle in Bonn, 2014. Credit: Christian Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
The perils of broadcasting in Arabic
Staff members need to be trained in how to identify both anti-Semitism and the anti-Zionism that targets Israel’s right to exist in order to exclude these perspectives from their programming.
Dec. 10, 2021
Ben Cohen
Ḗric Zemmour (left). Credit: Facebook/Ḗric Zemmour.
Featured Columnist
Éric Zemmour, presidential candidate
Of all the issues that will be fought over in the forthcoming election, immigration and the broader question of French national identity are likely to be the most bitter.
Dec. 3, 2021
Ben Cohen
An Orthodox Jewish man outside a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter in Antwerp, Belgium, on Dec. 9, 2014. Photo by Johanna Geron/Flash90.
Featured Columnist
Europe’s Jews have an uncertain future, but a future nonetheless
A combination of optimism and defiance displayed by the continent’s Jewish professionals should be welcomed by all.
Nov. 26, 2021
Ben Cohen
Polish President Andrzej Duda. Credit: Grabowski Foto/Shutterstock.
Featured Columnist
Heard again: Cries of ‘Death to the Jews!’ in a Polish city
President Andrzej Duda likening the demonstrators’ actions in Kalisz to “treason,” and several members of parliament expressed an almost physical disgust. It’s clear that these far-right nationalists do not speak for the majority of Polish citizens.
Nov. 19, 2021
Ben Cohen
At center-front: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), along with other members of U.S. Congress, meet with Palestinian children in Hebron as part of a delegation organized by J Street, Nov. 10, 2021. Source: Jamaal Bowman/Twitter.
Featured Columnist
Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s ‘thought crime’ on Israel and the Palestinians
He and other left-wing activists are being told it’s not enough to support Palestinians by advocating their right to self-determination. Solidarity is only worthy if it presents them as colonized subjects of an apartheid regime that has no right to exist.
Nov. 12, 2021
Ben Cohen
Marchers honor the memory of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, 85, who was murdered in March 2018 in an anti-Semitic attack. Credit: European Jewish Press.
Featured Columnist
The Mireille Knoll murder trial: Will France deliver justice this time?
Even if it does, it won’t be forgotten that it took place in the shadow of the violent anti-Semitic murder of another Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, who killer was set free.
Nov. 5, 2021
Ben Cohen
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