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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.

Then-director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth at the Media Security Conference in Munich, Feb. 19, 2017. Credit: Kuhlmann/MSC via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Suddenly, Human Rights Watch discovers anti-Semitism
HRW has felt always uneasy addressing the issue from the left, reassured in the mistaken belief that once the Israeli “occupation” ends, then Muslim anti-Semitism will disappear as well.
May 22, 2020
Ben Cohen
Alexander Gauland, who leads the parliamentary group of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
The dangerous discourse of German victimhood
When you recall where it has led the world, and especially the Jewish people, in the recent past, vigilance today only seems like common sense.
May 8, 2020
Ben Cohen
Image of an anti-Semitic Twitter user advocating for the heavily Jewish town of Lakewood, N.J., to be “nuked.” Source: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
The return of populist anti-Semitism
Corona has exacerbated a new virus online, touching on the regulation of the Internet, global restrictions on hate speech, national security measures and the prospect of tougher legal sanctions against both individual extremists and the platforms that host them.
April 24, 2020
Ben Cohen
Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, the meeting room of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Credit: Ludovic Courtès via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
China’s hallowed status at the United Nations
The fact that the Communist regime has been included on a panel to decide some of the world’s human-rights issues is just another example of how the various agencies that compose the U.N. system can be twisted to favor one member state even as they discriminate against another.
April 17, 2020
Ben Cohen
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, May 12, 2017. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Jeremy Corbyn in historical perspective
When he took the stage at the United Kingdom’s annual Glastonbury Festival in 2017, reveling in the thousands of audience members chanting his name to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, many commentators saw this rock-star moment as inaugurating a boldly new and potentially unstoppable Socialist opposition.
April 8, 2020
Ben Cohen
"Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. Source: Screenshot.
Featured Columnist
Daniel Pearl’s murderer gets ready for freedom
Should his release go forward, Omar Saeed Sheikh will become that rare thing—a jihadi who achieved legendary status not through “martyrdom,” but through defeating the system that imprisoned him. That is not an outcome that any Western government should desire.
April 3, 2020
Ben Cohen
A view of the Chinese Communist Party. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Calling out racists in America and in China’s Communist Party
To speak of the party’s responsibility for the coronavirus while shedding light on its broader human-rights outrages isn’t “racism”; if anything, it’s an act of solidarity with the people of China.
March 27, 2020
Ben Cohen
Chinese President Xi Jinping with Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2016. Photo: Official Khamenei website via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Columnist
Lies, transparency and pandemics
When authoritarian regimes lie to their own people about a worldwide, contagious disease, their lies have an impact on those of us who are otherwise mercifully spared from living under their direct jurisdiction.
March 20, 2020
Ben Cohen
The logo of the "Africa for Palestine" group, formerly BDS South Africa. Source: Twitter.
Featured Columnist
‘Rebranding’ BDS on the African continent
BDS South Africa’s shameful misrepresentation of Nelson Mandela as a militant anti-Zionist is simply one aspect of its broader campaign of defamation, in which no inaccuracy, half-truth or outright lie is too wild if it helps with the demonization of Israel and Zionism.
March 13, 2020
Ben Cohen
Black Death, Jews
Featured Columnist
What has changed since the ‘Black Death’?
It’s hard not to notice the conjunction of a viral epidemic that is itself drowning in false information and malicious speculation with a wider context in which political, racial and religious extremism is flourishing.
March 9, 2020
Ben Cohen
Pope Francis arrives to pray in front of the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, in Jerusalem's Old City, on May 26, 2014. Photo by Nati Shohat/FLASH90
Featured Columnist
The Vatican opens its wartime archive
For many in the Jewish world, it will be a seminal moment in the relationship between Catholics and Jews since the Second Vatican Council of 1965 famously exonerated the Jewish people of the charge of “deicide”—collective, eternal responsibility for the suffering and death of Jesus.
Feb. 28, 2020
Ben Cohen
Capt. Alfred Dreyfus being stripped of rank in the French military (“Le traître : Dégradation d’Alfred Dreyfus”), on Jan. 13, 1895. Credit: Henri Meyer, National Library of France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France).
Featured Columnist
J’Accuse! Our Dreyfus and theirs
Whatever WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange might be, he is no Dreyfus.
Feb. 24, 2020
Ben Cohen
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