Richard Cohen wrote what may be his most pathetic column ever in the Washington Post yesterday, entitled “They Honor Us With Their Hate.” It’s not an original idea, echoing to one degree or another formulations such as Bush’s “they hate us for our freedoms,” or similar statements from anyone who celebrates antagonism to what they believe is a just cause; neither is it original in its synthesis of pride and victimization. What might be original is its very particular combination of stupidity with glimmers of enlightenment.

Cohen’s jumping-off point is the Palestinian celebration of the 911 attacks. For some thousands of Palestinian youths, the attacks were cathartic. Cohen should understand this; he cites U.S. support for Israel as one of his just causes, but alertly qualifies it by saying that the support is sometimes “over the top” and that the U.S.-supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are (were, in the latter instance) “an abomination.” He should understand the urge toward catharsis, misplaced or otherwise, in the face of injustice because he listed it in another column as one of his reasons for supporting the invasion of Iraq, with its consequent destruction of life and property. “In a post-Sept. 11 world,” he said, “I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.”

One can imagine that, had they sat down and analyzed their situation, a relatively small group of young Palestinian men and boys whose daily routines include incessant reminders of their powerlessness in the face of Israel’s heavy-handed administration of their lives might conclude that celebrating an attack on Israel’s patron would be therapeutic, if only briefly, just as Cohen thought that killing some Iraqis would do wonders for our own national psyche. The Palestinians looked at 911, for those few celebratory hours anyway, as a blow struck at least in part on their behalf.

It didn’t do anything to materially improve their lot, and their reaction to a new attack would probably be more muted because of that, but for a few hours it helped them feel better, which is what Cohen (nobly, of course, on behalf of you and me) sought with the invasion of Iraq. But that Palestinian demonstration didn’t do anything like the lasting damage to their circumstances as the invasion did to ours. And it probably didn’t leave them in Cohen’s dire emotional straits, where the most profound emblem of national honor he can find is the enmity of a few thousand desperately impoverished and oppressed Palestinians who, as he acknowledges, have some reason to dislike us.

Even with all the craziness rampant in Palestine at the moment, one can fairly conclude that the most fanatic of them aren’t all that much more damaged than Cohen, who misses in all this a large distinction between them and us, which is that for all their savage merriment at our expense, they didn’t attack us, while we indisputably attacked Iraq, and indisputably aided Israel in its creeping, systematic subjugation of Palestine.

So the people who hate us, for whatever reasons, are not, by and large, in a position to do us much harm; even al Qaeda’s grand moment was more a matter of luck, everything going right for them and everything going wrong for us, than a measure of their actual capacity. We can do more damage to almost anyone, from sheer indifference or carelessness or even errant good intentions, than anyone can do to us out of malice. Certainly the Palestinians have no power to damage anything but a misplaced pride they did nothing to create. But their insult looms so large in Cohen’s mind that he has to write a column about it.

There are other peculiarities here, most notably one revolving around Abu Ghraib, in which Cohen marvels that his driver in Jordan — lord help us, he’s caught Tom Friedman’s taxi driver fetish — is traumatized to the point of speechlessness by the assault Abu Ghraib represents against “Islamic and Arab sexual taboos.” Maybe Cohen’s right and that was the sum of it, a specific cultural reaction to the ritual humiliations depicted in some of the photos, and not any generic concern for human rights. But his point mutated somehow to become an indictment of the driver’s parochialism and a minimization of the Bush regime’s transgressions.

Granted, George Bush and his calamitous war — not to mention his swaggering unilateralism — have made matters worse. It’s hard, for instance, to overstate the impact of Abu Ghraib in the Arab world. When a couple of years ago my driver in Jordan brought up the abuses at that prison, he became visibly upset. He was a college graduate who had been abroad — what might be called Westernized. Yet the wanton contempt for Islamic and Arab sexual taboos was almost more than he could take. Soon, he had to stop talking.

You see that this is in the context of, and by way of rationalizing, the damage Bush has done. Cohen is saying that, yes, there is that damage, but they already hated us anyway and it’s only some perverse strain of backward morality — Arab and Islamic morality, to be specific — that leads people like his driver to overreact to things like Abu Ghraib. In the West, we’re sophisticates who have passed beyond the influence of horror.

This judgment despite that the sight of Palestinians celebrating the death and misery on our soil obviously traumatized Cohen to his core, although not, unfortunately, into silence.

Richard Cohen is one very sick puppy.

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