Few American journalists embody America’s arrogant and humiliating approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples more blatantly than Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times since 1995.
Before Mr. Friedman tormented humanity with his biweekly opinions (including MacDonald’s Key to World Peace), he was Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem in the 1980s. His time in the Middle East helped him hone his Orientalist arrogance, which led to him starring in a 1989 essay by none other than Edward Said. Said spoke of the “ludicrous philosophicism of Friedman’s thought” and Friedman’s apparent belief in “who is a scholar?” What poets, historians, fighters, and politicians have done is not as important or central as Friedman himself thinks. ”
Of course, Friedman’s appointment as foreign affairs columnist has allowed him to share his own ideas more freely. Over the years, these ideas have included Palestinians being “caught in collective insanity,” Afghanistan equivalent to “special needs babies,” and the Iraqi state treating Palestinians as “caught in collective insanity.” This has included the idea that it is necessary to “involve people.” The “terror bubble” made famous by 9/11 was an event that Friedman admitted had nothing to do with Iraq.
Friedman’s relentless warmongering was fueled by a committed rejection of reality and its replacement with a reality in which “a lot of bad things would happen in a world without America, but not much good.” The fact that Friedman’s opinions so conveniently align with America’s foreign policy goals explains how a purveyor of “comedic philosophy” rose to such prestigious heights in a storied national newspaper. It is of great help.
But now that genocide is happening in the Gaza Strip, nothing is funny anymore. Friedman, a die-hard Israel fan who says with a smile that Israel “said hello,” is the go-to guy for an objectively logical person analyzing a war that has now killed more than 28,000 people. It was clear that it would not be a reliable source of information. Palestinians since October.
In his Feb. 13 column, Friedman reasserts his centrality to the Middle East by reasserting much of the credit for the Saudi-backed 2002 “peace plan.” Despite the current genocide of Palestinians, Friedman accuses Hamas of being an insurgent group. “Long-time enemy of reconciliation” and perpetrator of “a brutal down payment on Israel’s destruction” – never mind Israel’s apocalyptic monopoly on destruction and Hamas’ repeated rejection of cease-fire offers dating back to the 1980s. .
Despite “saying hello,” Mr. Friedman mysteriously claimed to be a serious critic of Israel, going on to announce: For now, I have no intention of discussing a two-state solution with the Palestinians. ” Regarding the people who are actually starting “fires” on a daily basis, he trivializes Gaza as merely “caught up in a conflict” and the West Bank as “simmering.”
Indeed, this is not pretty, but logical, for Israeli forces to inflict “significant material damage and collateral casualties” on Arabs during Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. It is not surprising that this was coming from someone who suggested that And he was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s sadistic attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in 2002 (enough about that year’s “peace plan”).
Approximately 10 days before his latest Israel-Palestine column, Friedman launched a message entitled “Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom,” which we, who have been charged with an extreme degree of intimacy with Friedman’s work, have begun to publish. I wasn’t even ready for that.
At first, of course, the article was thought to be some kind of disgusting joke or parody of Friedman. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. This would be grotesque enough even if the Israeli military establishment had not declared the Palestinian victims to be “human animals.”
Friedman explained that he sometimes likes to think of Middle Eastern politics “with analogies from the natural world,” placing the United States in the role of “still the king of the jungle in the Middle East,” but a tired “old lion.” . The Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other hand, “is to geopolitics what a recently discovered parasitic wasp species is to nature.”
Friedman, citing Science Daily, explains how the wasp “injects its eggs into a live caterpillar, and the baby wasp larva slowly eats the caterpillar from the inside out, and when it’s full, it pops out.” He is explaining the situation to us. He went on to ask: “What better way to describe Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today?”
A better question might be: Is there anyone else in the world who can serve as a New York Times columnist without spouting nonsense about parasitic wasp eggs? Just in case we don’t fully understand this analogy, Friedman says that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a hornet, and he mentioned earlier that the four countries are caterpillars. These are the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Kataib Hezbollah.
Friedman laments that “there is no counter strategy to safely and efficiently kill the hornets without setting the entire jungle on fire.”
Never mind that the old and jaded Lion and his Israeli accomplices have wreaked far more deadly destruction on the Middle East than all the hornet eggs combined. Burning down entire jungles has been the modus operandi of the United States and Israel for many years, and here again is championed by Friedman as essentially the only option.
In any case, there’s no time for murderous incoherence since Friedman, who just appointed Hamas as one of his hornet eggs, suddenly decides that the group is a “trapdoor spider.” They use great speed to capture their prey, drag it back to their burrow, and eat it, all in the blink of an eye. ”
While there is clearly no need for an animal equivalent to the military that spent more than four months with U.S. assistance slaughtering Palestinian children, women, and men, Friedman argues that Israel’s bloodthirsty Benjamin He makes a very strange but harmless comparison between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Sifaka. Lemurs (sorry, lemurs of the world).
Nearing the end of his dehumanizing tirade, the New York Times columnist threw out his final defiance of political correctness and basic human decency. “I sometimes watch CNN and ponder the Middle East. Otherwise, I prefer Animal Planet.”
In his 2002 book Longitudes and Attitudes, Friedman boasted that the only people who reviewed his biweekly columns before publication were “the copy editors who edited them for grammar and spelling.” Perhaps it’s time to revise that arrangement.
And as Thomas Friedman approaches his 30th anniversary as a columnist who continued to sensitize his audience, it appears there may be another candidate for the title of parasitic wasp.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.