After so many years of being wrong about the Palestinians being ready to make
peace with Israel, it is difficult to take New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman’s Middle East advice columns seriously. But his latest effort in this
genre contains some whoppers that got our attention even if they only provide
more proof the veteran writer is still hopelessly out of touch with
reality. – Jonathan Tobin,
Commentary magazine, April 4, 2012
Beinart’s
total disregard for reality, his sanctimonious obsession with moral
abstractions, is a great obstacle to real reconciliation because it protects the
enemies of peace while making impossible demands on those who really want it. –
Daniel Doron,
The Jerusalem Post, April 15, 2012
Hast thou betrayed my credulous
innocence; With vizor’d falsehood and base forgery? – John Milton,
Comus, 1634
The latest offerings of ignorance and arrogance from Peter Beinart and Tom
Friedman triggered a deluge of well-deserved outrage and an array of caustic
critiques of the dubious duo’s duplicitous drivel.
Betrayal of
professional integrity
While several commendable ripostes were posted, the first
two excerpts above caught my eye as being particularly apt in the way they
conveyed the essence of Beinart’s and Friedman’s portrayals of reality – as
hopelessly detached from the truth and devoid of context.
Indeed, both
men have betrayed their professional integrity by conveying to their readers a
picture which is not only wildly distorted and deceptive, but apparently
deliberately so.
Both make the dismayed question of the “Lady” in
Milton’s 17th-century masque regarding the exploitation of innocent credulity
through falsehood and forgery distinctly apposite today.
In last week’s
column I pointed out how much of Beinat’s condemnation of Israeli actions was
founded on evidence that ranged from the flimsy to the false, and how his
inflammatory accusations were based on a selective and slanted presentation of
events. This week I will focus on the New York Times’ Friedman.
If not
objective at least ‘well-founded’ Of course, it is unlikely that the followers of
the opinion columns in the “paper of record” expect the views expressed in them
to be objective in the sense that they abstain from taking sides on any given
issue. However, one assumes, they would expect them to be well-informed, in the
sense that should be moored to some factual foundation, however contentious,
rather than fraudulent figments of fantasy.
It is one thing to hold
unfavorable opinions of Israel and its government. It is quite another to feign
factual support for those opinions by gross misrepresentation.
To his
discredit, this is precisely what Friedman has done over a considerable period,
with his most recent piece on Israeli arguably outdoing all his previous
perversions.
Perhaps a preliminary tour d’horizon of the disingenuous
denigration of Israel that has characterized his columns would be useful in
setting the context in which the “whoppers”– as Tobin dubs them – in Friedman’s
most recent article on the Middle East conflict should be seen.
Constant
condescending contempt Over recent years, Friedman has vented his bias and bile
on Israel through a series of articles which convey his condescension and
contempt for the Jewish state. One of the most egregious pieces was the
disdainfully headlined, “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem” (March 13, 2010).
In
it, Friedman adopts the most malevolent elements of anti-Israel
slander.
He suggests that the Israeli government was putting the lives of
American troops at risk – because during a visit by Vice President Biden, the
Interior Ministry announced the approval of an interim planning stage for
expansion of a Jerusalem neighborhood situated closer to the Knesset than Du
Pont Circle (in central Washington) is to the Capitol.
Approvingly,
Friedman quotes Biden’s mindless allegation that “what you are doing here
undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan. That endangers us and endangers regional peace.”
Had it not
been for the carefully choreographed commotion the Obama administration elected
to make over the incident, the announcement, in all likelihood, would have gone
largely unnoticed.
Feigning dismay With breathtaking disregard for the
truth, Friedman feigns dismay: “Continuing to build settlements in the West
Bank, and even housing in disputed East Jerusalem, is sheer madness. Yasser
Arafat accepted that Jewish suburbs there would be under Israeli
sovereignty.”
Why “feigned dismay?” Well, for starters the article was
written in March 2010, during a 10-month building freeze on all settlement
construction in the “West Bank” which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu imposed
despite powerful opposition from his political base, as an unprecedented
goodwill gesture, which the Palestinians spurned.
Is it remotely
plausible that Friedman was unaware of this crucial and widely publicized
information? Was he appalling derelict or deliberately deceitful in creating the
impression that Israel was not in fact abstaining from the “sheer madness” of
settlement construction?
Moreover, since the neighborhood involved, Ramat
Shlomo, falls within the confines of Jerusalem, it was not subject to the
construction freeze. Indeed, most of its initial development was undertaken
under the government of the Nobel peace laureates Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin
in the mid-1990s. So if we are to take Friedman at his word, it would be
included in the “Jewish suburbs that Arafat accepted would be under Israeli
sovereignty.”
So why would approval of building there be in any way
objectionable – let alone “sheer madness?”
But, of course, Friedman’s take on
Arafat’s position is – to be charitable – highly “creative.” Indeed, in Tobin’s
terminology, it might well be deemed another “whopper.”
For in stark
contradiction to his claim that “Arafat accepted that Jewish suburbs [of East
Jerusalem] would be under Israeli sovereignty” in a peace agreement, Akram
Hanieh, a close Arafat adviser, and a member of the Palestinian Camp David team,
states: “Arafat firmly rejected any fragmentation of... the Jerusalem issue and
stuck to the Palestinian insistence on Palestinian sovereignty over all East
Jerusalem” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.30, (2) p. 87) It would be
intriguing to learn on what sources Friedman draws to substantiate his
extraordinary claim.
Applauding hypocrisy?
But Friedman misleads his
readers not only with what he says – but with what he does not.
So while
he applauds Vice President Joe Biden’s display of anger at Israel’s building in
east Jerusalem, he conceals the fact that it was none other than Sen. Joe Biden
who supported/sponsored and/or cosponsored at least half-a-dozen congressional
resolutions calling not only for US recognition of an undivided Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel but for the US to relocate its embassy to the
city.
These included a resolution (S. CON. RES. 21) which...
calls
upon the President and Secretary of State to publicly affirm as a matter of
United States policy that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of the
state of Israel; and urges United States officials to refrain from any actions
that contradict United States law on this subject.So when Friedman fawns
that he is “a big Joe Biden fan [because] he is an indefatigable defender of US
interests abroad,” was he referring to Biden’s earlier endorsement of Israel’s
sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem or his later excoriation of Israel’s
actions that reflect that sovereignty? Or perhaps the good Tom is so
unscrupulous that he is actually lauding Biden’s blatantly hypocritical
condemnation of Israel for creating precisely the reality he himself called for?
Brazen effrontery
In his “I Believe I Can Fly” (January 13, 2010), Friedman
chides Netanyahu for not extending the building freeze that expired three weeks
earlier, for another 90 days. Curiously – or perhaps not – he makes no
reference to the fact that the 300-day moratorium on settlement construction did
not produce the slightest sign of Palestinian willingness to resume
negotiations; nor does he offer any reason why an additional 90 days would do
so.
He does, however, have the effrontery to suggest that the refusal to
extend the freeze “makes Israel look like it wants land more than
peace.”
Really? One can only wonder how Friedman would reconcile this
absurd accusation with the fact that Israel has:
• evacuated the entire Sinai
Peninsula, forgoing its oil resources and strategic depth;
• withdrawn
unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, unearthing its dead from graveyards;
•
demolished settlements in Northern Samaria; and
• allowed armed militias to
deploy adjacent to its capital and within mortar range of its
parliament.
All this in the hope of peace. So might we not ask: Has the
New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist lost his mind – or just his moral
compass?
Endorsing the ‘Elders of Zion?’
But perhaps most distressing element in
his torrent of invidious invective is Friedman’s endorsement of anti-Semitic
slander reminiscent of the “Jews rule-the-world” themes in
The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. You have to read it to believe it.
In his snide
“Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir” (December 13, 2011), he jeers: “I sure hope that
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing
ovation he got in Congress... was bought and paid for by the Israel
lobby.”
In his “Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone” (September 17, 2011), he
makes the staggering accusation that the US commander-in-chief is hostage to the
Israeli leadership “because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season
can force the administration to defend Israel at the UN, even when it knows
Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.”
Get
this: These perfidious US Jews are so wicked – and apparently stupid – they
will, for the sake of their kinfolk, coerce their own country to adopt a policy
is that not only inimical to its national interest but also to that of their
kinfolk, in whose name they are allegedly acting.
Confusing, isn’t it?
This, of course, begs the question of how these treacherous wretches attained
positions of such awesome power that enable them to bring the most powerful man
in the world to heel, when they are so dumb that they cannot – unlike Friedman –
differentiate between policies that are in their interests and those that are
not.
Embracing a mass murderer
One could, of course, go on cataloging the
myriad times Friedman has misread or misrepresented events – from endorsing the
Arab Spring as the harbinger of democratic change to applauding Fayyadism as the
herald of Palestinian economic vigor. With the Islamists ascendant across
the region and the international community on the verge of despair regarding the
sustainability of the Palestinian economy, how loopy do his analyses and
prognoses seem today?
But Friedman really hits a bizarre note in his most recent
column on the Arab- Israeli conflict – “A Middle East Twofer” (April 4,
2012).
Apparently losing patience with recalcitrant realities that
regular refute his assessments, he embraces convicted mass-murderer Marwan
Barghouti (as left-leaning liberals are wont to do).
Echoing precisely
the sentiments that were propounded to legitimize engaging Arafat in the 1990s –
and we know how well that worked out – he cites Haaretz in anointing Barghouti
as “the most authentic leader Fatah has produced [who] can lead his people to an
agreement.”
It should be recalled that Barghouti’s alleged “authenticity”
reflects itself in his conviction for five murders – all perpetrated after (!)
Ehud Barak’s far-reaching – indeed, irresponsible – 2000 Camp David peace
proposals.
Miraculously, Friedman manages to see Barghouti’s recent
statement from his prison cell as a call for “nonviolent
opposition.”
Indeed, if anything is it quite the opposite. As
Ramzy Baroud points out it was a call to cease negotiations with Israel, and for
the “launch of large-scale popular resistance... to oppose the occupation
in all means.” All means, Tom, not nonviolent ones.
Condoning
‘nonviolent’ murders?
It turns out that Friedman has a very “unconventional”
notion of what the term “nonviolent” signifies, for he appears to include – or
at least condone – stonethrowing.
Does Friedman really need to be
reminded of the lethal consequences of Palestinian rock-throwing, which recently
took the lives of one-year-old Yonatan Palmer and his father, Asher? Or of
infant Yehuda Shoham who died in hospital a week after a rock hurled by
Palestinians through his parents’ windscreen crushed his head. Friedman’s
cavalier attitude to “every rock the Palestinians throw” spurred Ed Koch, the
former mayor of New York who himself experienced a “nonviolent” Palestinian
rock-attack, to dispatch a letter to the
New York Times editor.
Koch
writes: “Many Israelis as well as foreign tourists have been badly injured,
sometimes permanently maimed, in such ‘nonviolent’ assaults. Israelis have even
been murdered by rock throwing.” He ends by asking, “Can’t we all agree
that in the English language, the terms ‘nonviolent’ and ‘rock-throwing’ are
mutually exclusive?”
No allegation too egregious
As with Beinart, so with
Friedman: it seems there no accusation is too egregious, no allegation too
outlandish for them to stoop to.
They are inflicting great – and greatly
unmerited – calumnies on the State of Israel. They are curtailing its ability to
fend off the many dangers facing it and its citizens.
It is time to hit
back, time for Israel – and its supporters across the globe – to let its
detractors know that their unfounded invective has consequences. Just as they
conveyed that message to judge Richard Goldstone.
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