Ben Cohen writes that "no outcome, farcical or otherwise, is preordained" for Angry Arab's chums, gets called "Zionist hoodlum" for his trouble

It all started with a fairly upbeat NY Times article about a paper whose "editorial chairman" has a picture of Imad Mughniyeh on the wall of his office. Angry Arab comments in his first reaction to the article "the publicity for Al-Akhbar is not bad these days: not that it needs it." One of said chairman's statements reported in the article, however, appears to require damage control:

This sentence in the article got my attention; it said that Ibrahim Al-Amin wants to: "remove Israel from the map and send the Jews back to Europe." I asked Ibrahim and he tells me that he did not say that sentence that was falsely attributed to him. He said that the interview that was conducted by Robert Worth through an interpretor was not accurate in transcript perhaps because the interpreter who came with Worth was so "weak" that he and Mansour (a colleague at the paper who runs the website) had to correct her. He explained that he was talking about the future demise of Israel and that he added that in such eventuality many Israeli Jews may immigrate to Europe and the US.

Angy Arab wants us to take this as just a neutral prediction, not something to be wished for? He certainly has an ample store of credibility to make this sort of assertion, after yearning in print and in English for more catastrophic fires to hit Israel and after being "bothered" in print and in English that Hizbullah does not have bigger missiles. In the meantime Ben Cohen, of Z-Word Blog fame, has offered some observations on Al Akhbar's brand of Leftism, assuming that the details reported in the Times are highly telling, which seems reasonable enough. AA takes him to task for daring to make such observations without knowing how to read Arabic, but if AA's own opinions are any indication, and he has published vast quantities of them in English by way of his blog, Cohen's observations are fairly astute. After a reply by Cohen, AA writes in a further installment:

he states categorically that Al-Akhbar is "viciously antisemitic" when in reality Al-Akhbar is the only Arabic newspaper to ever publish articles (by me and others) condemning Arabic anti-Semitism.

I do see AA pointing out anti-Semitism from time to time on his blog, but only in ways that suit his agenda. Here is an example:

As you all know, I have written before about the alliance over the years and decades between Zionism (and the state of Israel officially) with anti-Semites around the world. We know that Israel did not have better allies in the Arab world than Anwar Sadat (an unrepentant Nazi with a history of anti-Semitism), Abu Mazen (a holocaust denier), Muhammad Dahlan (who curses Jews in every meeting as a friend of his recently told me), and the Maronite church . . . It is cute (not really) how Zionists protect anti-Semites if they don't bother Israel.

The man's a regular crusader against anti-Semitism. Did he really never notice that Abu Mazen's Holocaust denial has been pointed out countless times by "Zionist hoodlums"? If you are wondering what sort of mind can turn Abu Mazen's Holocaust denial into a reproach against Israel, it gets worse. He observes in another post: "Some people in the East and West often observe that Arabs have a tendency to blame too many of their problems on Israel. I say: we should blame Israel far more than we do." Is the output of Al Akhbar's other writers any better than this? For now I'll just have to be guardedly doubtful. We Arabic-challenged Zionist hoodlums will just have to wait for the English version to become available.