Few American journalists so transparently embody America’s pompous and humiliating approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples as Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times since 1995.
Before tormenting humanity with his twice-weekly opinions (such as McDonald’s is the key to world peace), Friedman was the Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem in the 1980s. His time in the Middle East allowed him to refine his Orientalist arrogance, which landed him the starring role in a 1989 essay by none other than Edward Said, who noted the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” and Friedman’s apparent conviction that “this that scholars, poets, historians, fighters and statesmen is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.
Of course, Friedman’s inauguration as foreign affairs columnist gave him greater freedom to share what he himself thought. Over the years, these reflections have included the fact that the Palestinians are “in the grip of collective madness”, that Afghanistan is the equivalent of a “baby with special needs” and that the Iraqi nation should “suck it up” to break up the country. “terrorist bubble” that came to prominence on 9/11 – an event with which Friedman nonetheless admitted Iraq had nothing to do.
Friedman’s persistent warmongering was facilitated by a categorical rejection of reality and its replacement with one in which “a lot of bad things are happening in the world without America, but not a lot of good things.” The fact that Friedman’s views align so well with American foreign policy goals goes a long way to explaining how a purveyor of “comical philistinism” rose to such prestigious heights within the national newspaper of record.
However, with the genocide currently taking place in the Gaza Strip, nothing is very funny anymore. A die-hard Israel fan – so much so that he was delighted that Israel “had me at hello” – Friedman was clearly not going to be the go-to source for any objectively logical person for analyzing a war that has now killed more than 28,000 people. Palestinians since October.
In his February 13 column, Friedman reaffirms his self-proclaimed centrality in the Middle East by once again claiming much of the credit for the 2002 Saudi-backed “peace plan.” Despite the current genocide of the Palestinians, Friedman criticizes Hamas as a terrorist group. “the long-time enemy of reconciliation” and perpetrators of a “brutal down payment on Israel’s destruction” – not to mention Israel’s apocalyptic monopoly on destruction and repeated rejections of Hamas truce offers dating back from the 1980s.
Friedman, who curiously insists on presenting himself as a serious critic of Israel, even if he has been “welcomed”, goes on to announce: “I understand perfectly why the Israelis, who suffer fire every day from Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis, do it. I don’t want to discuss a two-state solution with the Palestinians at this time. » As for the people who “catch fire” daily, he reduces Gaza to a mere “engulfment by conflict” and the West Bank to a “boiling point”.
Certainly this was not surprising from the man who, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009, suggested that it was “not pretty, but it made sense” that Israeli army “inflicts substantial material damage and collateral losses” on Arab populations – and who enthusiastically applauded the sadistic Israeli attack in 2002 on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank (so much the worse for the “peace plan”) of that year).
About ten days before his last column on Israel-Palestine, Friedman published a dispatch titled “Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom,” which even those of us who have been condemned to extreme intimacy with the Friedman’s work were not prepared.
At first, it was understandably thought that the article was some sort of sick joke or parody of Friedman. Alas, this was not the case. This would be grotesquely crazy enough if the Israeli military establishment had not declared its Palestinian victims to be “human animals.”
Explaining that he sometimes prefers to think about Middle East politics “with analogies to the natural world,” Friedman casts the United States in the role of an “old lion” who is “still the king of the jungle of Middle East” but tired. The Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other hand, “is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.”
Citing Science Daily, Friedman explains how the wasp “injects its eggs into living caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting once they’ve had their fill.” . He then asks: “Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? »
A better question might be whether there’s no one else in the world who could serve as a New York Times columnist without babbling nonsensically about parasitoid wasp eggs. In case we haven’t fully grasped the analogy, Friedman points out that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp, while the four aforementioned countries are the caterpillars. The eggs are the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.
Friedman laments, “We don’t have a counter-strategy that kills the wasp safely and effectively without setting the entire jungle on fire.”
Never mind that the tired old lion and his Israeli accomplice have caused more destruction in the Middle East than all the wasp eggs combined. Burning the entire jungle has long been the US-Israeli modus operandi, and is once again supported here by Friedman as basically the only option.
Either way, there’s no time to dwell on a deadly inconsistency as Friedman – who just named Hamas as one of the wasp’s eggs – suddenly decides that the group is instead a “spider- trap” which, according to an anonymous natural site, “leaps at high speed, seizes its prey and brings it back into the burrow to be devoured, all in a fraction of a second”.
There is obviously no need for the animal equivalent of an army that spent over four months massacring Palestinian children, women and men with US support, but Friedman manages a comparison to the both deeply bizarre and innocuous of bloodthirsty Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the sifaka. lemur (apologies to all lemurs around the world).
Having reached the end of his dehumanizing speech, our New York Times columnist issues a final challenge to political correctness and basic human decency: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East while watching CNN. Other times I prefer Animal Planet”.
In his 2002 book Longitudes and Attitudes, Friedman boasted that the only person who reviewed his biweekly columns before publication was “an editor who edited them for grammar and spelling.” Perhaps it is time to rectify this arrangement.
And as Thomas Friedman approaches his 30th anniversary as a columnist where he injects his audience with incendiary nonsense, it seems there might be another contender for the title of parasitoid wasp.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.