- Friedman’s Orientalist views criticized
- Equates Middle East with animals
- Advocates destructive US-Israel policies
Few American journalists more openly exemplify the United States’ arrogant and denigrating stance towards Arab and Muslim territories and populations than Thomas Friedman, who has served as a columnist for the New York Times on foreign affairs since 1995.
Before afflicting humanity with his biweekly musings (such as the notion that McDonald’s holds the key to world peace), Friedman was the bureau chief of The New York Times in Beirut and Jerusalem during the 1980s. During his sojourn in the Middle East, he had the opportunity to refine his Orientalist conceit, which propelled him to the forefront of an essay authored by Edward Said in 1989. Said described Friedman’s ideas as “comic philistinism” and questioned his apparent conviction that “the accomplishments of poets, historians, statesmen, and scholars are not as significant or central as his own thoughts.”
Undoubtedly, the appointment of Friedman as a foreign affairs columnist granted him increased autonomy in expressing his personal views. These notions have evolved over time to include the following: that the Palestinian people are “engulfed in a collective madness,” that Afghanistan is comparable to a “baby with special needs,” and that Iraq needed to “suck on this” to burst the “terrorism bubble” that had manifested itself on September 11 – an event that even Friedman admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.
Friedman’s Controversial Mideast Commentary
A persistent denial of reality and a worldview in which “many negative events transpire in the absence of America, but few positive ones.” have permitted Friedman’s expansionism. The remarkable alignment of Friedman’s views with US foreign policy objectives significantly contributes to elucidating the meteoric rise to prominence of a purveyor of “comic philistinism” at the preeminent national newspaper.
However, since a genocide is currently underway in the Gaza Strip, nothing is particularly humorous. Due to his ardent support for Israel (he even boasts that Israel “had me at hello”), it was evident that Friedman would not be the primary source of information for any rational individual seeking to comprehend a conflict that has claimed the lives of over 28,000 Palestinians since October.
Friedman reasserts his self-proclaimed Middle East authority in his February 13 column by claiming much of the credit once more for the 2002 “peace plan” sponsored by Saudi Arabia. Irrespective of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, Friedman condemns Hamas as a “longstanding adversary of reconciliation” and the authors of a “brutal down payment on Israel’s destruction” – disregarding Israel’s apocalyptic monopoly on destruction and Hamas’s repeated rejections of truce offers since the 1980s.
Friedman, who oddly maintains the appearance of being a discerning critic of Israel despite having been “had at hello,” proceeds to assert: “I completely comprehend the Israelis’ reluctance to engage in discussions regarding a two-state resolution with the Palestinians at this time, given that they are under constant pressure from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.” Regarding the individuals who are experiencing daily “fire,” he characterises Gaza and the West Bank as “engulfed in conflict” and “boiling,” respectively.
Friedman’s Disturbing Warfare Analogy
This was to be expected from the individual who, in 2009, expressed that it was “not pretty, but logical” for the Israeli military to “inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties” on Arab populations during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and who enthusiastically supported and led the sadistic Israeli attack on the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin in 2002 (so much for that year’s “peace plan”).
The dispatch “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” was published approximately ten days prior to Friedman’s most recent Israel-Palestine column. Even those of us who had obligated ourselves to become extremely familiar with his body of work were not ready for what it contained.
Initially, one might instinctively perceive the article as a twisted joke or a parody of Friedman. Sadly, that was not the case. The Israeli military establishment’s categorization of Palestinian victims as “human animals” would have rendered this situation already grotesquely absurd.
Friedman, who sometimes finds Middle Eastern politics more enlightening “through analogies from the natural world,” compared the US to a “old lion” that is “still king of the Middle East jungle” despite its weariness.
In contrast, the Islamic Republic of Iran “represents nature to geopolitics what a newly identified species of parasitoid wasp is to insects.”
Friedman’s Controversial Middle East Metaphor
Friedman informs us, with reference to Science Daily, that the aforementioned wasp “injects its eggs into living caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae consume the caterpillar from the inside out, erupting once they have consumed their food.” Subsequently, he inquires, “Today, is there an even more accurate depiction of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq?”
An alternative inquiry could be whether there is no one else on the planet capable of assuming the responsibilities of a New York Times columnist without engaging in pointless babbling concerning parasitoid wasp eggs. For those who have yet to completely comprehend the analogy, Friedman distinguishes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the wasp and the four countries mentioned above as the caterpillars. Houthi, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Kataib Hezbollah comprise the eggs.
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“We have no counterstrategy that kills the wasp safely and effectively without setting fire to the entire jungle,” laments Friedman.
Ignore the fact that the combined destructive power of the Israeli accomplice and the aged, exhausted lion
in the Middle East dwarfs the sum of all the wasp eggs. The US-Israeli strategy of destroying the entire jungle has been in place for quite some time, and Friedman endorses this notion once more as essentially the only viable alternative.
Friedman’s Disturbing Analogies Exposed
Regardless, contemplating murderous incoherence is futile, as Friedman abruptly concludes that the group is the “trap-door spider,” which, according to an unnamed natural site, “leaps out at great speed, seizes its prey, and hauls it back into the burrow to be devoured in a fraction of a second.” This realisation follows from the appointment of Hamas as one of the wasp eggs by the group.
A military that has slaughtered Palestinian children, women, and men with US support for more than four months has no need for an animal equivalent. However, Friedman manages to make a profoundly bizarre yet harmless comparison between bloodthirsty Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the sifaka lemur (apologies to all lemurs everywhere).
As his dehumanising tirade draws to a close, our columnist for The New York Times makes one final defiance of political decorum and fundamental human decency: “At times, I reflect on the Middle East through the lens of CNN.” On occasion, I have a preference for Animal Planet.
According to Friedman’s 2002 book Longitudes and Attitudes, the sole individual who examined his biweekly columns before they were published was “a copy editor responsible for correcting grammar and spelling.” It may be necessary to modify that arrangement.
Moreover, as Thomas Friedman approaches the 30th anniversary of his columnist career during which he has injected incendiary drivel into his audience, it appears that another candidate could be vying for the moniker of parasitoid wasp.
