#Thomas friedman

[mysharona1987]

Unlike this guy, I know not to describe human beings as insects.

Everyone reading this knows never to describe human beings as insects.

We have better journalism skills. Even if you aren’t a journalist.

We know this happened in WW2.

So we should probably win one of his three journalist Pulitzer Prizes, because we understand something he doesn’t.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Excellent column by Thomas Friedman for The New York Times. about how Trump’s Big Lie has torn apart the fabric of our society. Here are some excerpts that stand out:

We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.

I don’t think we fully understand the damage this has done to our social fabric and political system. It tore apart families at Thanksgiving dinners. It sundered longstanding friendships. It divided neighborhoods, City Councils, state assemblies, PTAs, boardrooms and newsrooms. And it distracted our whole country from the work of nation-building at home, making it next to impossible to do anything big and hard together.

It not only sullied our nation’s reputation as a democracy but also motivated a mob on Jan. 6 to storm our nation’s Capitol — with the expressed aim of overturning the election. [...] It also empowered autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and phony democrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban to strut around boasting that their own people will never have to worry about the “chaos” that democracy and voting bring.

Big Liar Trump, and all the little liars who surfed his scam for fun and profit — particularly Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and virtually the whole Fox crew — have done incalculable damage to our country. Shame on every one of you. [...] But the G.O.P. establishment is going to have to choose — keep losing with Trump or vote him off the island for DeSantis. Welcome to “Survivor: Florida.”

The best part is that this reckoning was delivered not by the G.O.P. leadership — they are cowards — but by the most important and quietly courageous people in this election.

It was delivered by everyday Americans: principled Republicans and Democrats and independents, young and old, voting against the Big Lie and its perpetrators in their local voting stations, just like mine, and our principled neighbors and fellow citizens who counted the votes carefully, fairly and honestly, just the way they always did — including in 2020.

[emphasis added]

[dadsinsuits]

Thomas Friedman

[plethoraworldatlas]

On February 2, 2024, The New York Times published a disturbing column by Thomas Friedman calling Middle Eastern countries insects -- and labeling the Middle East a "jungle."

This is racist and genocidal language. Please join our campaign and call on The New York Times to fire Thomas Friedman and name every editor who approved this ugly column for publication.In Friedman’s column, he compared Iran to a "parasitoid wasp." He also compared Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq to "caterpillars" and Hamas to a "trap-door spider." Meanwhile, Friedman compared the U.S. to an "old lion" and Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a specific kind of monkey -- the "sifaka lemur."

See how this kind of racism works?

[deadpresidents]

This journey was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a region that has long been my second home, and it allowed me to grasp something quite remarkable: how onetime enemies and rivals across the Middle East are on the cusp of becoming so much more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. It’s creating previously unthinkable partnerships, as well as huge internal stresses, as people in the neighborhood are trying to figure out just how modern, secular, open, entwined and democratic they want to be. No two countries exemplify this moment better than America’s two most important Middle East allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both are simultaneously undergoing fundamental internal struggles over their identities. The relationship between religious authorities and the state — as well as the very legal, social and economic rules of the game — in both Saudi Arabia and Israel has never been more up for grabs since each country’s founding. In Saudi Arabia, the societal transformations being imposed from the top down by the iron-fisted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) are now so profound that if you have not been to Saudi Arabia in the past five years, you may as well have not been there at all. When I last visited Riyadh, at the end of 2017, Saudi women were not permitted to drive. Today, not only are women behind the wheel, but the first Saudi female and first Arab female astronaut, Rayyanah Barnawi, just helped drive a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center up to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the threat to Israel’s original aspiration to be both a Jewish state and a democratic one is now so profound, posed by an extremist government trying to crush the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court, that it has produced an unprecedented 22 straight weeks of massive street protests from democracy-devoted Israelis. If you have not been to Israel in the past five months, you may as well have not been there at all. In other words, America is now, in effect, present at the re-creation of two nations vital to our interests. Two nations who are at the same time secretly discussing making peace with each other. And two nations that are also figuring out how close to be with America’s increasingly Middle East-focused great-power rival, China.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

What makes it funny is that Friedman and the New York Times have been proclaiming the death of the Israel they supposedly once loved for forty years now. In the 1992 collection of essays With Friends Like These: The Jewish Critics of Israel, a chapter by Jerold Auerbach described Friedman in the early 1980s as watching “an Israel he had deeply believed in while in high school and college recede from gilded, heroic mythology to the shadows of bleak reality.” And, as Auerbach notes, Friedman’s disillusionment with Israel even predated the 1980s Lebanon War. “By the time he graduated from Brandeis University in 1975, he had already identified himself with the Palestinian national cause, with apologies for PLO terrorism, and with the single organization so reflexively critical of Israel that it quickly became a pariah group within the American Jewish Community.”

Friedman writes basically the same falsehood-riddled column after every major or minor news development in Israel. He predicts that this time this latest event — whatever it might be — is going to lead the world and American Jewry to shun Israel. Each time, Friedman’s fear turns out to be wrong. In 2017, for example, Friedman claimed, “the foundations of Israel’s long-term national security are cracking… Under the leadership of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Israel is … drawing a line between itself and the Jewish diaspora, particularly the U.S. Jewish community that has been so vital for Israel’s security, diplomatic standing and remarkable economic growth.” Five years on, Israel’s economic and diplomatic standing is stronger than ever, thanks to the Abraham Accords and to Netanyahu’s leadership, and Friedman looks foolish.

Other commentators have already made interesting additional substantive points responding to Friedman’s hysteria. For the Jewish News Syndicate, Jonathan Tobin noted that any gaps between Israel and American Jewry may be more attributable to assimilation among American Jews than any Israeli electoral outcome. “If Jews don’t care about being Jewish, then they aren’t going to be inclined to support Israel, no matter who is in its government,” Tobin writes.

Elliott Abrams, writing at his Pressure Points blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, advises, “hold off on the doomsday talk. Netanyahu is a known quantity as prime minister because he was Israel’s longest-serving prime minister ever. His party is by far the largest in his coalition and as his long record shows he is as canny a politician as Israel has produced. Moreover, he has in the main been pretty prudent as a leader, avoiding war and conflict whenever possible and watching carefully where the voters are. It is not at all to be assumed that the government will be under the thumb of Ben Gvir and or Smotrich.”

[eretzyisrael]

Granted, Friedman has unleashed some harsh attacks on Netanyahu over the years. But the rhetoric Friedman has used in those verbal assaults has been so over-the-top that no responsible Israeli, whether on the right or the left, could endorse it. For example, sounding an awful lot like Pat Buchanan, Friedman wrote on Dec. 13, 2011 that the standing ovations Netanyahu received in Congress were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Similarly, Friedman asserted in a column on Nov. 19, 2013 that “many American lawmakers [will] do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”

In short, Friedman’s problem with Israel has nothing to do with Netanyahu. It has nothing to do with Israel’s rightward turn in the latest election. Friedman is an equal-opportunity Israel-basher. He has criticized center-left governments headed by Rabin and Peres, centrist governments headed by Sharon and center-right governments headed by Netanyahu.

Blaming the Israeli election for his hostility towards Israel is an easy out for Friedman. But it’s dishonest. The record proves that Friedman has harbored a lifelong conviction that, in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, Israel is basically wrong, the Palestinian Arabs are basically right and his mission as a journalist is to heckle and harass the Israelis until they finally give in to Arab demands.

[theculturedmarxist]

If you just followed news reports on Ukraine, you might think that the war has settled into a long, grinding and somewhat boring slog. You would be wrong.

Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day.

For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. Take the two high-profile leaks from American officials this past week about U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war:

First, The Times disclosed that “the United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.” Second, The Times, following a report by NBC News and citing U.S. officials, reported that America has “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike” the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This targeting assistance “contributed to the eventual sinking” of the Moskva by two Ukrainian cruise missiles.

As a journalist, I love a good leak story, and the reporters who broke those stories did powerful digging. At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior U.S. officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather are edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that.

You know things are bad when Thomas Friedman is the one saying "hey maybe this reckless military adventurism might be a bad idea."

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“How can we best promote world peace? As always, Thomas Friedman has a stunningly original answer: by building more McDonald’s. Here’s Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” from his new book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

…[A]s I Quarter-Poundered my way around the world in recent years, I began to notice something intriguing. I don’t know when the insight struck me. It was a bolt out of the blue…. And it was this:

No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.

That’s what passes for an insight, in what passes for the mind of Thomas Friedman. Please note that this man is the possessor of what he himself calls “the best job in the world”: Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times. He is paid a huge salary to Quarter-Pound his way around the world producing “insights” like this. That’s the most interesting aspect of the whole Friedman phenomenon: not that Friedman is a bear of very little brain (because after all, there are a lot of Poohs in the woods) but that this Pooh is a leading writer for America’s newspaper of record.

Why would a hegemonic world power hire an outright halfwit as spokesman?

The very stupidity of Friedman’s analyses must somehow serve the Empire’s purposes. Once you admit this possibility, you can see that it fits an historical pattern. Again and again, the truly powerful Empires hire mediocrities; it’s the marginal empires which generate the great sloganeers – Mao, for example. Whatever else may be said about him, Mao came up with some great lines, from “paper tiger” to “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” When those five-million-strong crowds chanted in Tienanmen, they were quoting some first-rate poetry. That little red book they waved enclosed some of the best lines of the century.

Friedman, slogan kommissar of a much stronger Empire, couldn’t get drunken Manchester United fans chanting. Consider his use of numbers. This was one of Mao’s favorite mnemonic devices; “Smash the four olds!” “Destroy the Seventh Snake!” All Friedman has to offer is “The Three Democratizations” – but Friedman’s three D’s are so uninspiring that two days after finishing his book, I can only name two of them. If this guy was working for the Chinese Propaganda Ministry, he’d soon find himself collecting glowing camel-dung in the most radioactive districts of Sinkiang.

But the US, like nineteenth-century Britain, is so strong that it doesn’t want talented poets working for it. Think of the intentionally flat slogans of the British Empire:

“England expects every man to do his duty.” “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

Dull lines – meant to be dull. The British, in their glory days, revelled in their dullness, associating real poetry with women, the French, and other lesser species. There was an element of gloating in the very dullness of their slogans: let the conquered know that they are ruled by mediocrities.

The slogans Friedman develops in this book have the same triumphant dullness. Their purpose is not to inspire Americans, but to convince everyone else that there’s no way to stop “Globalization-Americanization” (his term). Take his favorite oxymoron, “The Golden Straitjacket,” his name for the state-model created by Thatcher and Reagan. It’s “Golden” because if you implement it, your country will supposedly get rich. It’s a “Straitjacket” because, as Friedman says over and over again, it takes away all your freedom. He compares this straitjacket to the Mao suit, evoking those grey-clad crowds in the great Tienanmin Square rallies:

‘The Golden Straitjacket is the defining garment of this globalization era. The Cold War had the Mao suit, the Nehru jacket, the Russian fur [sic]. Globalization has only the Golden Straitjacket. If your country has not been fitted for one, it will be soon.”

Friedman comes up with dozens of glib, sloppy metaphors implying that there is no way out of “globalization-Americanization,” and that anyone who tries to resist will be stampeded. He refers to the wired-up leaders of the movement as “the Electronic herd,” which tramples anything in its way. He takes the cattle-herd metaphor further, dividing the wired American elite into “long-horn” and “short-horn” cattle, and adds that the herd is served by the “bloodhounds” of financial-rating services like Moody’s.

Friedman doesn’t seem to know that cattle herds aren’t usually guided by bloodhounds. But the clumsiness of his metaphors is part of his job. He’s here to threaten those who seem reluctant to join the herd. Who wants subtlety from a leg-breaker? The cruder the metaphor, the more frightening. Good poets don’t make good goons. And Friedman is pure goon, brass-knuckled platitudes all the way. Like a Naked Gun voiceover, he lets his violent metaphors stampede where they will. One of the most ham-handed metaphorical panics is what happens to this “electronic herd.” Within pages of its introduction, the “herd” is transformed from cattle to wildebeest, grazing the Savannah. Ah, but that’s only the beginning. You have to read it to believe it, so take a deep breath and follow Mr. Friedman into the Serengeti of international finance:

Think of the Electronic Herd as being like a herd of wildebeests grazing over a wide area of Africa. When a wildebeest on the edge of the herd sees something move in the tall, thick brush next to where it’s feeding, that wildebeest doesn’t say to the wildebeest next to it, “Gosh, I wonder if there’s a lion moving around there in the brush.” No way. That wildebeest just starts a stampede, and these wildebeests don’t stampede for a mere hundred yards. They stampede to the next country and crush everything in their path. So how do you protect your country from this? Answer: You cut the grass, and clear away the brush, so that the next time the wildebeest sees something rustle in the grass it thinks, “No problem, I see what it is. It’s just a bunny rabbit.” […] What transparency does is get more information to the wildebeests faster, so whatever they want to do to save their skins they can do in an orderly manner. In the world of finance this can mean the difference between having your market take a little dip and having it nosedive into sustained losses that take months or years to recover from.

Is he TRYING to be ridiculous here? I don’t think so. Friedman is a perfect spokes-beest for the entire herd. His endless Mister-Ed monologues comfort the other ruminants, reminding them of their hegemony.

But that doesn’t make for great Imperial poetry. In fact, by the end of that paragraph, with its African bunny rabbits, transparent wildebeest and brush-clearance program, poor old Mao is banging his head against the coffin-lid. Mao’s corpse is praying to Marx, Stalin, and Kwan-Yin for one day back on Earth, just time enough to liquidate this Friedman, whose hack-work shames ideological poets everywhere. In fact, seismologists detect widespread vibrations as Imperial poets from Virgil to Kipling batter their coffin-lids, screaming in agony, as Friedman drones on.

But there are horses for courses, and this garrulous Mister Ed is perfect as mouthpiece of the gloating, swaggering American Empire in its moment of triumph. Because Friedman’s not just dumb; he’s mean, too. He just loves to tell those about to undergo “Globalization-Americanization” that the process is going to hurt:

Unfortunately, the Golden Straitjacket is pretty much ‘one size fits all.’ So it pinches certain groups, squeezes others….It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it’s here and it’s the only model on the rack this historical season.

But of course he has to offer something which passes for evidence. So, to fill the time between “insights,” he recounts inspirational anecdotes gleaned from lickspittles and Uncle Toms the world over. Friedman meets the son of a leading PLO general, and is gratified that the boy is now working as a software salesman with no hard feelings over the fact that his father took a hundred bullets from an Israeli hit team. He is told by Anatoly Chubais, that herd bull of the Russian Young Wildebeest herd, that it’s Russia’s own fault entirely that the country is in ruins.

Russia, in fact, is the villain of this book. Friedman hates Russia – truly hates it, with a mealy-mouthed venom which does not make pleasant reading. His book begins with a quote from an American businessman whining that it’s “aggravating” that the Russian crash actually affects his profits. When he needs a bad example, it’s always Russian. He tells the hoary anecdote (an “insight” in this case, naturally) about the Russian elevator with misnumbered floors, and the equally venerable anecdote about the Russian who drives his tank to town because he doesn’t have a car. Oh, those funny, funny Russians, with their aggravating habit of starving to death just when we want to celebrate. Like many of the Empire’s leg-breakers, Friedman hates Russia for all sorts of reasons: as a child of cold-war America; as an Israel-can-do-no-wrong Middle-East correspondent; and above all as a popularizer of the get-with-the-program hegemony of the Golden Straitjacket. Russia doesn’t fit into the Golden Straitjacket very well. In fact, the Straitjacket made Russia so uncomfortable that by 1998, its screams were audible even in the offices of the New York Times. Friedman and his masters will never forgive Russia for ruining the gloat-fest with that discordant scream.”

- John Dolan, “THOMAS FRIEDMAN: THE EMPIRE’S USEFUL IDIOT: AN EXILE CLASSIC.” The eXiled. June 8, 2000. Issue 92.

[dailyfreier]

Top Ten Reasons Hamas Wants to Leave Qatar

Lately Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal have been threatening to leave their comfy lair in Qatar, which is a respected actor on the world stage that is definitely NOT a giant gas station/television studio providing aid and comfort to a bunch of psychotic murderers from the 7th century. So yeah… apparently the big machers at Hamas have ants in their pants and their boots are made for walking and….…

[garudabluffs]

Thomas Friedman and the Red Lines in Journalism on Israel and Palestine

His column comparing Middle East nations to insects reveals how the New York Times publishes crimes against human cognition.

"In a famous reviewOpens in a new tab of “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said describes Friedman’s writing as “strangely ignorant,” full of “comic philistinism,” and “offering dictums that are “moronic and hopelessly false.” On the other hand, Said writes, Friedman is “capable of uncompromising analysis” and “compassion and affection thus occasionally get through Friedman’s remorseless machine.

The same thing is true for the Times itself. Somehow it is simultaneously the worst and best newspaper on earth. On the one hand, it runs crimes against human cognition about the insects living in the Middle East. On the other hand, it also regularly produces brilliant investigative reporting, sometimes even about IsraelOpens in a new tab. 

This complexity is extremely cold comfort for the people who are brutalized by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, it’s important to comprehend if we’re trying to understand reality — something we should want to do, no matter how difficult and frustrating it can be."

February 7 2024 READ MORE https://theintercept.com/2024/02/07/israel-palestine-journalism-nyt-thomas-friedman/

David Ignatius and Tom Friedman each describe US hopes and plans for the Middle East - Biden imposed sanctions on some West Bank settlers ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/01/us-biden-administration-saudi-arabia-mbs-netanyahu-deal/

[filosofablogger]

The Very Definition Of 21st Century Autocracy

Our friend Gronda is definitely ‘back in the saddle’ after a too-long hiatus!!!  Let’s take a look at her post from a few days ago, and the assessment she shares by Thomas Friedman about how just four ‘men’ have set out to turn our globe upside down.  Thank you, Gronda, for this excellent assessment! Netanyahu/ Trump/ Putin/ Jinping are birds of a feather causing lots of havoc

[dadsinsuits]

Thomas Friedman

[rodrickcolbert]

New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman's Keen Insight in the Israel/Hamas Conflict.

Direct Quote: “when an event like this happens…this first thing that you have to ask yourself as a country is, ‘what does my enemy want? and let’s just do the opposite..” Thomas Friedman on the current Israel/Hamas war. Thomas L. Friedman