Thomas Friedman’s gallimaufry of lies
[ 02/12/2009 - 11:29 PM ]
By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem
In a recent article in the New York Times, the American Jewish journalist Thomas Friedman blamed the so-called Arab-Islamic “Narrative” for all the troubles surrounding US-Muslim relations-from the 9-11 terrorist events in 2001 to the recent killing of 13 American soldiers in Texas by American-born and American-bred Nidal Malik Hasan.
Friedman suggested that Muslims all over the world ought to show gratitude to the US for helping them in places like Kosovo, Bosnia , Darfur , Somalia , Lebanon , Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan , post-Tsunami Indonesia , Iraq and Afghanistan . True to his style, he carefully forgot the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the context of American intervention in these countries.
He also suggested that the American military crusades against the Muslim Middle East were meant as a message of deterrence and primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes-The Taliban and the Bathists.
Well, I don’t always take Friedman seriously. He is a fanatical Jewish supremacist who seems to think deeply in his heart that non-Jews are lesser human beings.
And when it comes to the Judeo-Nazi entity known as Israel, which is the central source of instability and agitation in the Middle East and beyond, Friedman loses all pretension of objectivity and fair discourse.
In fact, the reason I am responding to his screed is not because I think he has something worthwhile to say. In the final analysis, Friedman is just another shipyard dog of American Zionism who for many years shamelessly utilized his journalistic profession to support and defend Israeli terrorism, territorial expansion and wanton theft of Arab land.
I’ve decided to write a brief response because an American internet friend has asked me to do so. In addition, the American people, in whose name all this criminal war and oppressions are carried out, needs to be reminded from time to time of the real facts. I am saying this because it is really sad and lamentable that dishonest, or pathologically dishonest, journalists like Friedman are allowed to poison the American discourse unchallenged.
First of all, Friedman ignores the legitimate reasons and root-causes of Arab and Muslim dislike for the United States. Let me remind him of the following cardinal facts.
For decades, the US has been the main backer and enabler of Israeli terrorism, aggression and criminality against the peoples of the Arab and Muslim Middle East.
Successive America administrations since Truman, probably with the sole exception of the Eisenhower administration, effectively acted at Israel’s beck and call. They gave Israel the wherewithal to behave like a neighborhood bully-from the state-of-art of the American technology of death to dogged and overzealous shielding of Israel from international condemnation at the UN Security Council.
This fanatical embrace of a regime whose very existence constitutes a gigantic crime against humanity didn’t encourage Israel to walk in the path of peace. On the contrary, it emboldened her to commit every conceivable crime under the sun- from massacring Palestinian refugees en mass at Sabra and Satilla near Beirut in 1982 (in concert with allied Lebanese Christian militias) to raining white phosphorus on civilians in Gaza in 2008-9.
Indeed, thanks to unlimited and unrestricted American support of the criminal entity, some Israeli leaders were prompted to declare that “we control America and the Americans know it.”
Needless to say, the scandalously huge magnitude of America’s embrace of Israeli Nazism earned America the title of Israel’s guardian ally.
The Israeli-American alliance has never been a force for good, justice or democracy in the Middle East. The exact opposite is true. Thanks to this unholy alliance, Israel was able to have a free season on the helpless Palestinians, destroy their homes and farms, enslave them economically, narrow their horizons, and expel the bulk of the Palestinian people to the four corners of the globe.
In the final analysis, it was America’s pornographic disregard for justice and international law that enabled Israel to kill any real hopes for peace in the Middle East as Bob Simon, another American Jewish journalist, asserted in a recent documentary.
I don’t know why journalists like Friedman don’t tell their readers that a country that builds, by way of coercion and bullying, hundreds of Jewish-only settlements on occupied territory, doesn’t really want peace with its neighbor.
Similarly, I don’t know why these dishonest shapers of American public opinion don’t write and say through their respective media outlets, such as the NY Times, that the Israeli military occupation is nothing short of an act of rape since it robs the victims of their most fundamental human and natural rights.
This is a question that Mr. Friedman ought to answer honestly and straightforwardly.
In addition to its central role in tormenting and savaging the Palestinian people for decades, successive US administrations have been supporting tyrannical Arab despots who never stopped humiliating and oppressing their own people in order to preserve their autocratic but impotent Sheikhdoms, princedoms, fiefdoms, and kingdoms.
It is mainly due to enduring American support of these tyrannies, that the vast bulk of the peoples of the Middle East are denied the right to choose their own governments and rulers.
America is not ignorant or unaware of what is happening in the Arab Middle East. It is well aware of the extent to which basic human and political rights are denied. It is well aware of the feudal nature of governance in many of the so-called allied Arab countries. America watches the brazen shamelessness of dictatorship in the capitals of the Middle East but remains silent as if the Arab and Muslim masses were children of a lesser God.
Nonetheless, even this whoring hypocrisy toward Muslims doesn’t prevent American officials and spokespersons from lecturing Muslims on the virtues of democracy.
A few years ago, the Bush Administration cajoled the Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah to organize elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, when the Hamas liberation movement unexpectedly won these elections, the man in the White House lost his composure and expeditiously ordered a whole set of draconian measures to be imposed against the Palestinians to punish them for electing a political party that Israel and the US didn’t like.
After all of this, I wonder how people like Friedman still have the temerity and audacity to claim that the American invasion, occupation and destruction of two sovereign Muslim countries, which killed or caused the death of over a million innocent human beings, were merely meant to foster democracy in these unfortunate countries.
In fact, Friedman shamelessly indulges in fornication with language when he claims that for every stupid and bad act America committed-such as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, “our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.”!!!
Well, this is another obscene and pornographic lie that really goes beyond the pale of human decency. Where are those Arab countries which, thanks to American “altruism and kindness,” have been made able to democratically elect their leaders? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Jordan? Kuwait? The Gulf Sheikhdoms? Tunisia? Morocco?
Friedman and ilk might want to cite Iraq as an example to corroborate their canard. But everyone knows that the so-called Iraqi democracy is a controlled democracy and that the US would move swiftly to scuttle it in one fell swoop if there was the slightest chance that it would produce an anti-American leadership or even anti-Israeli leadership.
It is true that the US has done what might be thought to be positive deeds, such as building some schools in some Arab countries. But these acts are only meant to divert attention from America’s cardinal sins in the region, the sins of embracing Israeli Nazism and sustaining tyranny and dictatorship throughout the Arab world.
Well, perhaps I am being too hard on Friedman. After all, he is a product of a culture that killed millions of Native Americans and then called the genocide “manifest destiny.” This is the same country that allows and encourages Israel to liquidate the just Palestinian cause, by building settlements and stealing more Palestinian land, while calling the liquidation a “peace process.”
[ 02/12/2009 - 11:29 PM ]
By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem
In a recent article in the New York Times, the American Jewish journalist Thomas Friedman blamed the so-called Arab-Islamic “Narrative” for all the troubles surrounding US-Muslim relations-from the 9-11 terrorist events in 2001 to the recent killing of 13 American soldiers in Texas by American-born and American-bred Nidal Malik Hasan.
Friedman suggested that Muslims all over the world ought to show gratitude to the US for helping them in places like Kosovo, Bosnia , Darfur , Somalia , Lebanon , Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan , post-Tsunami Indonesia , Iraq and Afghanistan . True to his style, he carefully forgot the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the context of American intervention in these countries.
He also suggested that the American military crusades against the Muslim Middle East were meant as a message of deterrence and primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes-The Taliban and the Bathists.
Well, I don’t always take Friedman seriously. He is a fanatical Jewish supremacist who seems to think deeply in his heart that non-Jews are lesser human beings.
And when it comes to the Judeo-Nazi entity known as Israel, which is the central source of instability and agitation in the Middle East and beyond, Friedman loses all pretension of objectivity and fair discourse.
In fact, the reason I am responding to his screed is not because I think he has something worthwhile to say. In the final analysis, Friedman is just another shipyard dog of American Zionism who for many years shamelessly utilized his journalistic profession to support and defend Israeli terrorism, territorial expansion and wanton theft of Arab land.
I’ve decided to write a brief response because an American internet friend has asked me to do so. In addition, the American people, in whose name all this criminal war and oppressions are carried out, needs to be reminded from time to time of the real facts. I am saying this because it is really sad and lamentable that dishonest, or pathologically dishonest, journalists like Friedman are allowed to poison the American discourse unchallenged.
First of all, Friedman ignores the legitimate reasons and root-causes of Arab and Muslim dislike for the United States. Let me remind him of the following cardinal facts.
For decades, the US has been the main backer and enabler of Israeli terrorism, aggression and criminality against the peoples of the Arab and Muslim Middle East.
Successive America administrations since Truman, probably with the sole exception of the Eisenhower administration, effectively acted at Israel’s beck and call. They gave Israel the wherewithal to behave like a neighborhood bully-from the state-of-art of the American technology of death to dogged and overzealous shielding of Israel from international condemnation at the UN Security Council.
This fanatical embrace of a regime whose very existence constitutes a gigantic crime against humanity didn’t encourage Israel to walk in the path of peace. On the contrary, it emboldened her to commit every conceivable crime under the sun- from massacring Palestinian refugees en mass at Sabra and Satilla near Beirut in 1982 (in concert with allied Lebanese Christian militias) to raining white phosphorus on civilians in Gaza in 2008-9.
Indeed, thanks to unlimited and unrestricted American support of the criminal entity, some Israeli leaders were prompted to declare that “we control America and the Americans know it.”
Needless to say, the scandalously huge magnitude of America’s embrace of Israeli Nazism earned America the title of Israel’s guardian ally.
The Israeli-American alliance has never been a force for good, justice or democracy in the Middle East. The exact opposite is true. Thanks to this unholy alliance, Israel was able to have a free season on the helpless Palestinians, destroy their homes and farms, enslave them economically, narrow their horizons, and expel the bulk of the Palestinian people to the four corners of the globe.
In the final analysis, it was America’s pornographic disregard for justice and international law that enabled Israel to kill any real hopes for peace in the Middle East as Bob Simon, another American Jewish journalist, asserted in a recent documentary.
I don’t know why journalists like Friedman don’t tell their readers that a country that builds, by way of coercion and bullying, hundreds of Jewish-only settlements on occupied territory, doesn’t really want peace with its neighbor.
Similarly, I don’t know why these dishonest shapers of American public opinion don’t write and say through their respective media outlets, such as the NY Times, that the Israeli military occupation is nothing short of an act of rape since it robs the victims of their most fundamental human and natural rights.
This is a question that Mr. Friedman ought to answer honestly and straightforwardly.
In addition to its central role in tormenting and savaging the Palestinian people for decades, successive US administrations have been supporting tyrannical Arab despots who never stopped humiliating and oppressing their own people in order to preserve their autocratic but impotent Sheikhdoms, princedoms, fiefdoms, and kingdoms.
It is mainly due to enduring American support of these tyrannies, that the vast bulk of the peoples of the Middle East are denied the right to choose their own governments and rulers.
America is not ignorant or unaware of what is happening in the Arab Middle East. It is well aware of the extent to which basic human and political rights are denied. It is well aware of the feudal nature of governance in many of the so-called allied Arab countries. America watches the brazen shamelessness of dictatorship in the capitals of the Middle East but remains silent as if the Arab and Muslim masses were children of a lesser God.
Nonetheless, even this whoring hypocrisy toward Muslims doesn’t prevent American officials and spokespersons from lecturing Muslims on the virtues of democracy.
A few years ago, the Bush Administration cajoled the Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah to organize elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, when the Hamas liberation movement unexpectedly won these elections, the man in the White House lost his composure and expeditiously ordered a whole set of draconian measures to be imposed against the Palestinians to punish them for electing a political party that Israel and the US didn’t like.
After all of this, I wonder how people like Friedman still have the temerity and audacity to claim that the American invasion, occupation and destruction of two sovereign Muslim countries, which killed or caused the death of over a million innocent human beings, were merely meant to foster democracy in these unfortunate countries.
In fact, Friedman shamelessly indulges in fornication with language when he claims that for every stupid and bad act America committed-such as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, “our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.”!!!
Well, this is another obscene and pornographic lie that really goes beyond the pale of human decency. Where are those Arab countries which, thanks to American “altruism and kindness,” have been made able to democratically elect their leaders? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Jordan? Kuwait? The Gulf Sheikhdoms? Tunisia? Morocco?
Friedman and ilk might want to cite Iraq as an example to corroborate their canard. But everyone knows that the so-called Iraqi democracy is a controlled democracy and that the US would move swiftly to scuttle it in one fell swoop if there was the slightest chance that it would produce an anti-American leadership or even anti-Israeli leadership.
It is true that the US has done what might be thought to be positive deeds, such as building some schools in some Arab countries. But these acts are only meant to divert attention from America’s cardinal sins in the region, the sins of embracing Israeli Nazism and sustaining tyranny and dictatorship throughout the Arab world.
Well, perhaps I am being too hard on Friedman. After all, he is a product of a culture that killed millions of Native Americans and then called the genocide “manifest destiny.” This is the same country that allows and encourages Israel to liquidate the just Palestinian cause, by building settlements and stealing more Palestinian land, while calling the liquidation a “peace process.”
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