Stanley Cohen and Mona Eltahawy—a pair of jihad defenders—personify the proverbial match made in heaven…..or hell.

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Created on Tuesday, 20 August 2013 20:42

From the Stanley Cohen Haters, Frontpagemag.com (click for original article)

by John Perazzo

It is highly significant that Eltahawy’s defense counsel is Stanley Cohen, a longtime Hamas defender who prides himself on representing only those clients whose politics he agrees with. “If I don’t support the politics of political clients,” he says, “I don’t take the case.” Thus do we note, with keen interest, that Cohen’s client list includes such luminaries as the al Qaeda-affiliated Texas Imam Moataz Al-Hallak; the Oregon-based Imam and terror suspect Imam Kariye; the Global Relief Foundation co-founder and 9/11 co-conspirator Hazem Ragab; the bin Laden-connected terrorist Wadih el-Hage, who was convicted of conspiracy in the deadly 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa; and Hamas operatives Abdelhaleem Ashqar and Ismail Elbarasse.

In the mid-1990s Cohen also helped Hamas senior political leader Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook—who co-founded the terrorist Islamic Association for Palestine and Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development—avoid extradition from the U.S. to Israel, which wanted to try him for the role he and his organization had played in a number of bombings. Articulating his high regard for Marzook, Cohen has referred to him as “my dear friend.”

Also in the 1990s, Cohen—a proud admirer of Lenin—teamed with fellow Communist attorneys William Kunstler, Lynne Stewart, and Ramsey Clark to defend Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Group leader who was prosecuted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Most of my clients [are] involved with struggle, many of them armed struggle,” Cohen boasts.

Yet another “struggler” whom Cohen would very much have liked to help was none other than the late al Qaeda kingpin himself. “If Osama bin Laden arrived in the United States today and asked me to represent him, sure I’d represent him,” Cohen told the Village Voice in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. On September 22, 2001, Cohen said: “I don’t think this was an Osama bin Laden job at all. But I think for a lot of reasons the government would prefer it be Osama bin Laden. Because then there’s an identifiable bogeyman.” Speculating that “the government is going to use this [9/11] as a pretense … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country,” Cohen added that he was “absolutely” certain that “this operation was assisted by ex-CIA, ex-Mossad [Israeli intelligence agency] officers.”

It is not at all surprising that Cohen would implicate Israel, which he has long depicted as a “terrorist state.” In fact, in July 2002 Cohen filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the U.S. government stop giving financial support to Israel’s “program of killing, torture, terror and outright theft” targeting the Palestinians. The suit named President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, various Israeli military officials, and a number of American arms manufacturers—accusing them all of “genocide” and “war crimes.” Claiming that “what Israel does is far more morally repugnant than what Hamas does,” Cohen affirms the Palestinians’ “right” and “obligation” to “resist occupation … by any means necessary.”

Cohen is so confident in the valor of his cause, that he beams with pride when recounting such fond memories as when he once “had lunch with the alleged mastermind of the Achille Lauro ship hijacking,” a 1985 incident where Palestinian terrorists stormed a cruise ship and threw an elderly, wheelchair-bound American Jew overboard to his death; when he “spent a day with [Yasser] Arafat in Ramallah on the West Bank” and was treated “like a head of state” by the most prolific Jew killer since Adolf Hitler; and when he was given a number of audiences with the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas “spiritual leader” whose favorite pastime was to order the slaughter of civilian Jews. Years later, in fact, Cohen proudly displayed, in his office, a picture of himself seated alongside this same Ahmed Yassin.

In the final analysis, it would appear that Stanley Cohen and Mona Eltahawy—a pair of jihad defenders—personify the proverbial match made in heaven…..or hell.