Lawrence Davidson on The New York Times’ columnist’s failure to acknowledge the imbalance of violence over the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 during the First Intifada. (Efi Sharir / Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection /Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
By Lawrence Davidson
TothePointAnalysis.com
Thomas Friedman is a well known, prize-winning correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times. His area of interest has long been the Middle East and he has lived in both Lebanon and Israel.
Given the history of American media coverage of this area, led first and foremost by the NYT, that reputation might mean less than you think.
In a May 8 editorial, Friedman said that the campus protests against the Israeli war in Gaza had become “too big to ignore.” In addition, he confessed that he found them “very troubling.”
Why was that? Because he thought that the message and aims of the protesters “reject important truths about how the Gaza War started and what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable conclusion.” And, finally he asserted that student protesters ignored the feelings of Palestinians who object to Hamas and its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Let’s take a look at the positions that Friedman fines troubling:
No. 1 — How the Gaza War Started
According to Friedman,
“they [the protestors] are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on October 7.”
That helps make the protesters “part of the problem.”
Here Friedman’s understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is distorted by his (albeit liberal) Zionist predilections. He asserts that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack “triggered” the ongoing massive Israeli response. This assertion ignores the historical context.
Israel’s violence against the Palestinians, including its blockade of Gaza, has been a long-term constant — denying the Palestinians a stable society and economy. Indeed, Hamas’ action on Oct. 7 was itself provoked by years of Israeli aggression during which 5,000 Palestinians were killed (as against 170 Israelis).
Friedman in 2015. (Brookings Institution, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
What the Hamas’ action did on Oct. 7 was trigger a significant ratcheting up of otherwise non-stop Israeli aggression. As to the student’s perspective, their emphasis on Gaza means that most don’t see the behavior of Israel and that of Palestinians as anywhere near equal — and neither should Friedman.
I am not exactly sure if Friedman is referring to anything meaningful when he claims that the Palestinians breached a “cease-fire” on Oct. 7. As Atallah Al-Salim pointed out [in Security Context in October]:
“Just three weeks before the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map of ‘The ‘New Middle East’ during his speech to the U.N.’s General Assembly in New York. The map did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza. This reaffirmed what Palestinians knew, that there was no chance that Netanyahu’s government would proceed with peace talks with Palestinians.”
Hamas noted this behavior even if Friedman appears to have missed it.
Thus, it is sad but true, the Israelis have provoked every rocket launched against them, as well as their losses on Oct. 7. They did so by their unending brutality, the goal of which has always been ethnic cleansing. That being the case, the Oct. 7 Palestinian attack was basically defensive — an act of anti-colonial resistance.
Did it involve violence against Israeli civilians? Yes, it did. Has that violence been exaggerated by Israeli propaganda, swallowed whole by Western media? Yes, it has.
Should we be surprised by resistance violence given Israeli treatment of the Palestinians over the decades? No, we should not.
Friedman’s anger at the protesters for ignoring Israeli victims suggests his own failure to understand the imbalance of violence over the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
No. 2 — What Will Be Required to End the War?
Netanyahu showing map of “New Middle East” at the U.N. on Sept. 22, 2023. (UN Photo/Cia Pak)
Friedman is put off “when people chant slogans like liberate Palestine and from the river to the sea.” He believes that this sloganeering is calling for the erasure of the state of Israel. They are arguing, he asserts, “that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense.”
This is a questionable assumption on his part. Actually, the slogan referencing the land from river to sea was originally an Israeli Likud Party one and, in that case, it certainly was calling for “the erasure” of the national rights of Palestinians.
In the case of the protesters, it is a reported fact that most are calling for a cease fire, university divestment from Israel and the institution of a democratic Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all citizens.
Unfortunately, the non-racist goal of a democratic solution of one Israeli/Palestinian state is unacceptable to Friedman. He insists on a “two state solution” which he is convinced is “the only just and workable solution.” He believes this despite the fact that it is now known to have been made impossible by Israel’s own embedded Zionist ideology. That ideology dictates an exclusively Jewish state from “the river to the sea” — a vision made real by incessant Israeli expansion.
So in what sense is a two-state solution “workable”? One might also question the “justness” of Friedman’s two-state scheme. The way Friedman describes a Palestinian state is, to put it mildly, suicidal.
There are half a million Israeli settlers in Friedman’s would-be Palestinian state. Yet, he would want the Palestinian entity to be “demilitarized.” Considering that it has been the Zionist state and its settlers that have aggressively sought to ethnically cleanse Palestinians for the last seven decades, one would think that the best way to achieve “workability” would be to demilitarize Israel.
No. 3 — ‘Ignoring Gazans Who Detest Hamas’ Autocracy’
The Washington Post, and other major U.S. media outlets which, as far as I know, have never considered the possible popularity of Hamas and the other resistance groups operating in the Gaza Strip, have recently given coverage to about a dozen Palestinians who do not like Hamas.
Though the sample is very small, Friedman tells us that:
“These Palestinians are enraged by precisely what these student demonstrations ignore: Hamas launched this war without permission from the Gazan population and without preparation for Gazans to protect themselves when Hamas knew that a brutal Israeli response would follow.”
There is something a bit screwy about Friedman’s thinking here. How was Hamas, and the other resistance groups, to acquire formal permission from the Gaza population to “launch a war” (when in fact there was already a decades long war going on) without alerting the Israelis?
And, given the lack of effective anti-aircraft weapons, how was Hamas, or anyone else, to protect the population from Israeli/American jet fighters — which had periodically bombed Gaza no matter what the resistance did?
Finally, Israel’s response — which turned the Gaza Strip into a latter-day version of 1945 Dresden — was in fact out of proportion to Israel’s previous appalling violence in Gaza. So how was the Palestinian resistance suppose to know that the Israelis would now be “brutal” to the point of genocide?
The ‘TikTok Generation’
Columbia student pro-Palestine encampment on April 23. (Pamela Drew, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
In the end, Friedman comes up with a really wild conclusion:
“Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.”
And from this we are to conclude that Thomas Friedman himself “knows how to think critically.”
Here Friedman comes close to sheer fantasy. I doubt very much if the Palestinian resistance leaders, stuck as they have been within the world’s largest open air prison, were thinking at all about “the next global TikTok generation.”
More likely they were concerned with reactionary Middle East governments which were kowtowing to the Americans and Israelis. And the insult that “campus culture has become too much about what to think and not how to think” is, quite likely, the psychological projection of the skewed outlook of this particular Zionist editorial writer for the NYT.
‘Hardheaded Pragmatist’
Thomas Friedman describes himself as
“a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples.”
We have already considered how far the Israelis (most of whose “indigenous” status is dubious) will let this dream be realized — even if Hamas was willing to go along.
So, what else does he want us to do, in order to save both the Israelis and the Palestinians from themselves?
“What Palestinians and Israelis need most now … is a way to build more partners for peace. Invest in groups that promote Arab-Jewish understanding, like the Abraham Initiatives or the New Israel Fund. Invest in management skills … for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza …”
Quite frankly, at this stage of the game, these are palliatives that will not do.
Let me juxtapose what I believe the Israelis and the Palestinians need most: a democratic and equalitarian one state solution.
To attain this, the BDS movement must succeed against apartheid Israel as it did against apartheid South Africa. Pressure to that end must be kept up by rational people everywhere and, in the U.S., by those few politicians who understand what is at stake.
Here in the U.S., Israeli agents such as AIPAC are corrupting the American political system through bribery and blackmail. And, they are doing so for the sake of a racist regime that is destroying Judaism and its ethics.
In the end, the biggest problem in this struggle is Zionist Israel, not the Palestinian resistance. The two groups are not equal in strength or in their levels of violence. Does Mr. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winner that he is, understand any of this? Doubtful. That makes him “part of the problem.”
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.
This article is from the author’s site TothePointAnalysis.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Kudos to Lawrence Davidson and CN for publishing his expose of Zionist cultism and its contamination of an already compromised 4th estate by the malignant scribble of the NYT’s favored journalistic propagandist.
As Usual,
EA
one week after the ICC stated that israel’s actions in gaza
are ‘plausible’ genocide, thomas friedman suggested we try
“understanding the middle east through the animal kingdom”
and described various middle eastern countries as different
kinds of insects … HONESTLY?
iran a “parasitoid wasp” which lays eggs in “caterpillars”,
i.e. lebanon, yemen, syria, iraq, who’ll soon be eaten from
the inside out by the “eggs” = houthis, hezbollah, hamas?
by contrast, the US + israel are intelligent mammals, with
the US, of course, being the “king of the jungle” etc. etc.
and he worries about a “campus culture that has become
way too much about what to think and not how to think”?
I think Thomas Friedman DOES understand much more than the author states. But he deliberately takes the Zionist side despite understanding the historical injustice done to Palestinians by Zionism beginning with Herzl’s first Zionist Congress in 1897. Two points: In his Pulitzer winning book “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, when TF was just arrived on the scene in Beirut as the NY Times lead correspondent there, he relates how he was introduced to Lebanese Arabs who were opposed to Israel and to US policy in Lebanon and Israel. The quote from them came, after Friedman’s false presentation of himself and his ideology, that “You are one of the good guys”. TF did nothing to correct the misperception. In San Francisco some time shortly after Camp David 2000, I attended a speech by the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the US, who related a conversation he had had with Friedman. TF told him, “It’s your tribe against my tribe”. This is the essence of where Friedman is coming from. He presents himself as rational, as concerned, but make no mistake, he is a dyed in the wool Zionist masquerading as an even-minded, rational observer. In addition, he was a long time attendant of the same synagogue in Washington, DC as Dennis Ross, who was Clinton’s manager of the Camp David 2000 ‘summit’, the meeting that once and for all showed the Israeli cards vis-a-vis a Palestinian state based on international law UNSC 242 once and for all. Aaron David Miller, another member of Clinton’s team, said of the way Ross conducted that summit, “We acted as Israel’s lawyer”. Can anyone not imagine the conversations Friedman and Ross had after Sabbath services?
However, since no religion has such rights then Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, whatever, cannot claim a grain of sand on planet earth in the name of their religion and no-one gets to claim land because some followers lived there once.
Friedman, like most Israelis and their supporters is brainwashed to the point of psychotic mental illness in regard to Palestine. There are not two indigenous peoples for Palestine, only one, the Palestinians.
Jews are a religion and no religion makes a people or makes followers indigenous. It is biologically, anthropologically, legally impossible. Jews have no right to Palestine just because some Jews camped there thousands of years ago in a tribal kingdom.
If religions had such rights then it would apply to all religions. Muslims ruled India for 600 years and would have a greater claim to it than Christians who only ruled for 500 years. But Christians could claim Istanbul and much of Turkey which they ruled for more than a thousand years. And Muslims could claim most of Spain and a lot of Europe given their rule over those lands in centuries past.
However, since no religion has such rights then Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, whatever, can claim a grain of sand on planet earth in the name of their religion and no-one gets to claim land because some followers lived there once.
Indeed, Jews have lived in England for a thousand years so does that give them the right to call on Zionist forces to invade and set up their own State in the UK? Of course not and the same applies to Palestine.
Dismantle the racist, elitist, faux religious Jewish State called Israel in Palestine.
The same is true of all ascriptive groups (race, creed, color, ethnicity etc.), not only religions.
Even a past empire is not a valid land claim in the present.
Every branch of humanity has the same claim: all of their ancestors migrated through the Middle East since our origins in E Africa over a million years ago, so there have been thousands of empires there.
The tragedy of Zionism is that they followed the Nazi model of elevating aggressive tyrants in self defense.
Their claims to land in Palestine echo the Nazi demand for “lebensraum” or “living space” for their tyrants.
Friedman has always been an insipid, insidious, blowhard that has never published any truth about the crimes of the Israeli nation.
Like all such people, it is always someone else’s fault…
Thank you! I didn’t even read this article because I have no idea how someone endowed with a brain would find Friedman worth reading. He is so amazingly stupid and self-satisfied, and it is outrageous when another idiot refers to him as a “public intellectual.” Finkelstein is an intellectual, Friedman is an apparatchik who knows nothing but kowtowing to the powers-that-be.
Well said!
The thing is you don’t have to speculate about Hamas’ intentions with respect to their own innocents: their top strategists (some now assassinated by Israel and they’re about the only ones in this conflict I’m not sorry to see go) sat around and explicitly discussed how they could afford to sacrifice them. It’s hideously evil to sacrifice the people you supposedly represent in this way. If my kids died under such circumstances I know for sure who I’d hate most and what I’d do, and I think most Americans probably feel the same. So I think trying to exonerate Hamas is a terrible mistake that will tend to play into Israel’s hands. You have to instead try to explain the the cause is entirely valid regardless of the behavior of any of it’s advocates.
If I were a Palestinian — or an American! — I would support the people resisting the occupier. You must just love the fact that Israel runs the U.S. I personally oppose occupation.
I only hope Lawrence Davidson was able to address Mr. Friedman personally with his brilliant rebuttal. Friedman is a duplicitous Zionist whose self-righteous robes he continues to wrap himself around without a shred of humanity or compassion for the Palestinian people. This is where his own arrogance has lead him to. Davidson is heroic and will be demonized by many who are not interested in the truth. Every word he utters is a fact.
The world really needs to hear once again from Mister Suck On This.
hxxps://www.huffpost.com/entry/thomas-friedman-suck-on-t_b_104308
The “one-state solution” in Palestine would still have to confront the Zionist settler theft of Palestinian land. How could Palestinians peacefully live in the shadow of land that once made up their lives? I agree that the present “two-state” solution is a sham, but a better alternative would be to begin with a genuine two-state solution where Israel returns to its 1967 borders, which implies that all these Zionist settlers depart. Then, homeless Gazans could inhabit the settler’s homes, a cushy alternative to tents. This could only be accomplished by a concerted global effort, even possible military action. In the end and assuming an end to Zionist ideology, a one state could emerge, but it would not be ‘Israel’.
I invariably practice “critical thinking” – that is, I question whatever I read, and try to find alternative ways of thinking about the issue at hand. Ofter this yields results that I don’t agree with myself – it’s simply a different way of thinking about the subject, one that challenges received opinion. The purpose is to model independent-mindedness, and to provoke thought on the part of the reader, and on my own thinking. After all, writing is a way of thinking out a problem, to see what it looks like in print. I’m 84 years old, and have come to realize that “Death is a part of life.” There can be no life without death – not in this world, at least, and I know of no other. But how we relate to that fact is an open question. To accept it too easily would be fatal, but to ignore or deny it leads to foolishness as well. My tentative solution is to try to factor it in when thinking of life-and-death matters. If you’ve a better answer, I’d like to hear it. I could always change my mind.
I’m not sure what you’re on about here. Not sure at all.
Death is a part of life; I have never feared death, even when I was a teenager. But there’s quite a gap between death and deliberate mass murder.
Actually there is very much of what looks like real possible evidence for life after this present life. In particular there is an extensive web site by a retired Australian attorney named Victor Zammit who presents and links to much possible evidence. He makes the bold claim that
His web site is at
hxxps://victorzammit.com/
Disclaimer: I have never myself had any personal experience which would confirm or strongly indicate for me the possible reality of the afterlife, so I do not share the certainty that Victor Zammit claims. I would consider myself to be between 2 and 3 on Richard Dawkins’ scale of belief, where 1 = strong believer and 7 = strong disbeliever. However I very strongly think that if there might be real possible evidence for life after this present life then it ought to be known about and looked into.
[My previous comment, lightly edited for precision:]
It helps to be reminded, as Davidson does here, that the Hamas rocket attack on Israel, and its seizure of hostages, did not come as an “unprovoked act of aggression,” but was a desperate response to ongoing acts of aggression by Israel, including a blockade of Gaza that had made life very difficult for Palestinians living there. Of course, Israel will counter with instances of preceding hostile action by Hamas, and so we can follow the conflict all the way back to the creation of Israel and even further, to the aftermath of the first World War, over 100 years ago. In that context, no one’s hands are clean, including ours, and the first order of business is to stop the present killing. The fate of “innocent” hostages is a matter of concern, but no more than the fates of the hundred- or thousand-fold numbers of Gazans who are dead or dying as we speak.
Thomas Friedman is the kind of ninny – Francis Fukuyama is another – who thinks that economic and technological progress is automatically making the world a better place. Prosperity simply brings about a population increase, which in turn creates greater pressures on the finite resources of our planet. Those Israeli settlers on the West Bank are simply looking for the better lives that cheap land offers them, while their belief that God made this land for them enables them to persecute their Palestinian neighbors and push them out. Immigrants from poorer lands into more prosperous ones are reacting to the same pressures, and are willing to risk their lives in order to make their children’s lives better. The point is simply to stop killing Gazans as a way to solve the present crisis. But when, inevitably, the invasion stops, the conflict will remain unsolved, and all the technology in the world won’t solve it. In fact, the conflict can be ameliorated, but there is no solution. Killing each other is the way of civilization and of human life itself, as it is the way of the ants and of every sentient species. Probably even trees do it too.
Friedman’s the kind of very nicely salaried useful idiot who reveres Klaus Schwab of the WEF and Tedros Whatsisname, the stooge frontman for the WHO cabal, and then makes their actual conspiracies against the world sound reasonable to his readers. Only recently he was saying that ordinary Americans feeling the pinch are deluded as the economy is really doing very well!
Him and Paul Krugman! And thanks for the reference to Tedros Whatshisname, the former warlord. I still can’t comprehend how anyone takes these useful idiots seriously for a second.
I find it very disturbing that somebody would accept this as something inevitable, and not something that humans, with their reasoning ability and critical facilities, and something that might be called a “soul” or “spirit”, might possibly find a way to be able to rise above. Albert Einstein said that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.
Incidentally this is a reason that I have problems with an atheistic or materialistic or nihilistic philosophy. I personally have a very hard time believing or accepting that our reasoning ability and our critical facilities, and especially our “soul” or “spirit”, our sense of right and wrong, are only a product of entirely natural processes. I consider myself to be a Deist. I very strongly believe in God, or a higher Intelligence, who can be thought of a having given us our reasoning ability, our critical facilities, and our sense of right and wrong. I also do not adhere to any of the “revealed” religions such as Christianity or Islam, and do not accept any alleged revelation from God, such as the Bible or the Koran, as actually being such.
And I also very strongly believe in the possibility of life after this present life, and justice working out in a future life. There is much possible evidence which one can find on the internet.
I detail the development of my beliefs in my write-up linked to by my screen handle.
All the “experts” must advocate for the staus quo from which they benefit.
“Does Mr. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winner that he is, understand any of this? Doubtful.”
Of course he “understands” it … he is not unintelligent. He knows and understands the history and current realities very well. He knows, for example, that the 2-state solution would require the forced removal of about one million fanatic Jewish settlers from the W Bank, and that this ain’t ever gonna happen.
That he understands what he proposes as the only solution is nonsense and yet he continues to propose it tells you it’s not a problem of understanding; it’s a problem of genocidal intent.
Simply stated, false premises beget false solutions!
I do think Friedman is unintelligent. Being published in the NYT is no sign of intelligence. For years I’ve wanted to compile a humor book composed of editorials and op-eds from the NYT because they seem to frequently publish writers who have no idea what they’re talking about. One of my favorites was the editorial supporting the use of bovine growth hormone which was quite clearly written by someone with no knowledge of agriculture / husbandry.
Excellent commentary. If only the wider public could read pieces like this one. But that can’t happen in our corporate-controlled and censored media. We are hastening toward either (or both) failed state status in the US and Armageddon via our provoking endless conflict across the planet. Attacking Russian targets inside Russia is crossing a Rubicon from which there may be no turning back. In the West, we are ruled by psychopaths.
The NYT/Friedman claims are standard zionist propaganda asserted viciously throughout the US.
The rationalizations of genocide in response to the 10/7 attack are clearly false:
1. Obviously the conflict did not start on 10/7 and Hamas did not make an unprovoked attack. That is infantile “he hit me first” nonsense. As Mr. Davidson notes, Israel has killed far more than 5,000 innocent Palestinians and destroyed the lives of millions, in service to the zionist tribal tyrants whom it elevated to serve themselves, who have caused the whole problem, and like the “defense” tyrants of all ascriptive groups including Hitler, have no intention of civilized resolution. Also recall that zionist fanatics had just invaded the Al Aqsa mosque, third holiest site of the Islamic world. and declared that it would be converted to a Jewish temple: so extremist responses would certainly be expected.
2. If it is OK for Israel to kill thirty times as many civilians as were killed on 10/7, in retaliation, then:
(a) it is sufficient for Hamas to show 40 civilians killed by Israel to rationalize killing 1200 on 10/7; and
(b) it is now OK for Hamas to kill thirty times as many Israeli civilians in response to the genocide (over a million).
Obviously that argument goes nowhere, fails to consider any aspect of conflict resolution, and is zionist propaganda.
Don’t expect that a one-state solution would ever work. Zionists control the US government through political bribes siphoned from US aid to Israel, and could far more easily control any one-state government. The best solution is to relocate Israel to a low-density area duly purchased from or arranged by treaty with a democratic country.
The only solution allowing Israel to remain in Palestine would be the design of two viable states each with coastline, ports, water, farmland, and infrastructure, demilitarized and separated by a large DMZ enforced by neutral UN forces. Populations would have to relocate with property swaps or bonds backed by DMZ property, with payments reduced by any destruction of property. That inconvenience sure beats genocide. The US would probably have to demilitarize Israel despite its bribes of the US government. Maybe BRICS will offer bribe-matching? My guess is that Israel must be embargoed and starved out to submit to any fair international conflict resolution, and the sooner the better.
Perhaps the US will create a New Israel reservation in New Mexico or elsewhere in the desert southwest, if Israel disarms, dissolves, and agrees that for three generations, they may have no weapons, make no funds transfers to political officials or parties or mass media, not work in any military industry, and not run for any public office. That may require BRICS bribe-matching and embargoing/starving out Israel as well. But perhaps the US doesn’t really want dishonest fanatical zionists on its own soil any more than the Palestinians.
You don’t think it’s enough that we already stole the land from the indigenous peoples?
The short sighted understanding ,for many, provides the perfect results that the MSM and controllers want as a result. Few bother to follow the history often providing the answer as why we are where we are today.The 2 minute sound bites are more often than not, meant to deceive .Anyone that has studied the history of Palestine ever since Balfour was given the nod to the zionists by the British will know this.I would say much the same is happening in Ukraine due to the 2014 coup .Most do not even know that it happened and who caused it .
What would empire do without the likes of Thomas Friedman?
Gazan’s focused on Tik-Tok? What a bozo.
76 years and counting…When is persecuting, dehumanizing, massacring Palestinians enough? When is the WHITE ANGLO/SAXON world finally willing to realize and admit what is going on? Jews are god’s chosen people??? Bad choice.
Friedman is loyal to whoever pays him and it impacts his thinking!
Friedmann is just one of many presstitudes who are never paid for thinking or rational analysis of historical facts but for blatant propaganda serving their pay masters, here obviously the Zionist cabal in full control of the plutocratic regime in the USofA. No more to say about this tautology for independent thinkers.
There are similarities between the war in Gaza and in Ukraine. Israel ‘s position is that the current war started on October 7th. Actually, what is occurring is simply an escalation of a long existing war. And it’s an escalation that Netanyahu wanted. In Ukraine, Western governments insist that the war started on February 22 because they don’t want to acknowledge that the Russian invasion was merely an escalation, albeit a large one, of a long existing war. That war started in February 2014 with the (guess who) USA led overthrow of the existing Ukrainian President who became President on his lean Russia stance. This is an escalation that Washington D.C. wanted. Both of these wars are proof that two long standing observations of war will never, ever fade away. # 1. The first casualty of a war is the truth. # 2. The Fog of War never dissipates.
Right you are, Robert, and if you study history back even further, you find evidence that „Ukrainian“ hostility against Russian, that is the roots of the current conflict in Ukraine were planted already during the First World War! And you can even go further back in Slavic history to understand current conflicts based on historical facts and not on the spew of war propaganda.
It’s high time that the likes of a Thomas Friedman be fried and buried alive, and Lawrence Davidson has done just that!
“For the second time in as many years, Thomas Friedman has explicitly advocated that the United States use the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a proxy force against Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. The New York Times foreign affairs columnist made this suggestion in his Wednesday column, ‘Why Is Trump Fighting ISIS in Syria?’ (4/12/17).
[…]
Friedman is not advocating the US stop bombing ISIS on anti-war grounds or because US bombing has led to thousands of civilian deaths—all perfectly correct and sensible reasons to oppose the US ‘War on Terror’ in Syria—but because giving ISIS space to breathe will kill more Syrians, Iranians and Russians.
[…]
This comes after a 2015 column in which Friedman (3/18/15) floated the idea that the United States should directly arm ISIS:
‘Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?'”
Source:
Adam Johnson, “Thomas Friedman’s Perverse Love Affair With ISIS,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), April 13, 2017
Well, the historically informed readers know that ISIS and other related so called Islamic terror groupings have been created and are maintained by the US, Zionist Israel, and GB. Just to confirm your reasoning.
Thomas Friedman needs to retire – in fact the NYT needs to close its doors for good…
Hear, hear!
Did you see the stuff today about the troubles WaPo is in? Their readership has halved, and they’re running big deficits.
Like all liberal Zionists, Friedman lives in a fantasy world created and sustained by the murderous Zionists who actually run Israel. As Ilan Pappe has pointed out, the “two-state solution” is a complete sham, designed to yoke fools like Friedman (and politicians like Bernie Sanders) into believing that, somehow, a peaceful solution is always just around the corner, if it wasn’t for those damned Palestinians who don’t want to be “partners in peace.” Revealingly, Friedman repeats Netanyahu’s favorite lie.
You are correct. One state is the only viable option…tho opposed by the Zionists and USA!
Word up, dude. I abandoned the phony baloney two-state “solution” as a red herring lonng time ago. I’ve coined my one-state apartheid-ending solution ISRAELESTINE. Pass it on!
I live for a day when the Thomas Friedman´s of our land are driven into such obscurity that their death will go unnoticed to all the world. No saintly rite of burial; not a column inch outside a local paper announcing their departure from this world.
Patrick Lawrence posted an insightful tribute to former diplomat, Moorhead Kennedy, whose worldview changed during his 444 days in the US Embassy in Tehran. Kennedy wrote, “When it comes to foreign affairs, the last thing in the world an American is willing to do is to think or to try to think what it would be like to be a Soviet, to be an Arab, to be an Iranian, to be an Indian. And the result is that we think of the world as a projection of ourselves, and we think that others must be thinking along the lines we’re thinking. And when they don’t, we’re troubled by it.”
Patrick then follows with, “When I read this remark my mind went immediately to that intellectual charlatan of the Bush II years, Richard Perle, who argued with supreme and consequential stupidity following the 2001 attacks, ‘Any attempt to understand terrorism is an attempt to justify it.’ And then I thought of the discourse concerning Hamas: One must call Hamas ‘terrorist’ at all times and without exception and in every mention so as to avoid all understanding, just as Perle insisted.”
Indeed. Look at the charade in Congressional hearings with these university presidents. Pathetic members of Congress matched with pathetic leaders from academies. Case in point and the most egregious (and inarticulate) I have seen: Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers. A black president and scholar of African American history for god’s sake!
As Rep. Good (in name only) asked, “Do you think Israel’s government is genocidal?” Holloway responds, “Um sir, I don’t … have an opinion on Israel’s um …in terms of that phrase.”
Would it really take so much courage to say, “Absolutely!”? I’m sure he has plenty to retire on and live comfortably all his days. What a betrayal of an historically oppressed people! But these are the vapid, cowardly minds genuflecting to our hubristic leaders as they race us into oblivion.
Perle’s ‘Any attempt to understand terrorism is an attempt to justify it’ is the heart of the thing, isn’t it? I have often been puzzled why my fellow Americans don’t understand that knowing why people do things is different from justifying what has been done morally. But it’s a key element is the narrative control mechanism of the “west” … i.e. “they hate us for our freedom”, or somesuch.
Unlike Moorhead Kennedy, who must have been a true believer in the system (there are many in the lower and mid ranks) who had his eyes opened by exposure to the “other”, Perle was the type of knowing evil for which there is no justification.
The refusal to see the world through any eyes other than one’s own and one’s rulers is symptomatic of the addicted American mind. Substance abusers never think about what other people feel or experience; they are the centers of their own universes, and that pretty well describes most Americans.