It gets better, too.

I looked up the meaning, to see what others said about it. It's apparently about "terrorism," according to critics and Cohen himself.

Wikipedia.

But then Cohen paraphrases another poem.

I remember there was a great poem by Irving Layton that I once read, I'll give you a paraphrase of it. It was 'well, you guys blow up an occasional airline and kill a few children here and there', he says. 'But our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein. The whole world is still quaking.'"

Way to make it sound totally not Jew-y, dude.

Like, just keep your mouth shut on that, and you had some level of plausible deniability.

Cohen may have been referring to this stanza from "The Search" by Irving Layton.

Iconoclasts, dreamers, men who stood alone:
Freud and Marx, the great Maimonides
and Spinoza who defied even his own.
In my veins runs their rebellious blood.

Yeah.

Whether conscious or subconscious, given his own explanation, it's pretty hard to read it any other way. This is about Jews versus Western civilization.

Also, Maimonides was a Rabbi who was the personal physician of Saladin. Yes, that Saladin.

Is it really every single time?