Verso (2011)
To mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, FAIR shares an excerpt from Belén Fernández’s 2011 book The Imperial Messenger (Verso)**, a critical look at Thomas Friedman, who as foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times was one of the most influential media voices interpreting 9/11 and justifying its employment as a rationale for the US government’s ongoing “War on Terror.”
Especially clear in Thomas Friedman’s dealings with the Arab/Muslim world is the idea that, just because America is “not always at our best in how we act toward the world” (9/4/02)—which he intermittently admits without delving into the details of murderous campaigns in Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere—this should not have a sustained negative impact on its global image, or arouse undue suspicion about its present motives.
Consider Friedman’s acknowledgement (2/26/03) prior to the start of the war on Iraq that only after 9/11 “did the US begin to call for democracy in the Arab world—but only to get rid of Yasir Arafat and to punish those Arab regimes it did not like, namely Saddam Hussein’s.” Six months later and five months into the Iraq war, the global superpower was fully rehabilitated into democratic consciousness with Friedman’s announcement (8/13/03) that “Iraqis and other Arabs are now being treated to something radically new: our ideas, the revolutionary side of American power.”
‘Not being used for oil’
Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose (5/30/03) to “suck. On. This.”
Given that the radical new treat is still only being used to punish the regime of Saddam Hussein, and that it is being delivered via illegal military attack on a sovereign nation, the “many leftists” Friedman (10/30/03) subsequently accuses of not understanding the war for democracy may be forgiven for their confusion. Baathists and Arab dictators, on the other hand, have somehow managed to correctly interpret America’s spontaneous revolutionary transformation, and Friedman informs us that “they understand that US power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo,” and that is instead “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched.”
Friedman himself (1/5/03), of course, states this very same year that the war is “partly for oil.” The previous year (10/30/02), he also incidentally explains that the “rage” that caused 9/11 “is due in part to anger at US support for anything Israel does,” and in part to “the way too many Arab regimes, backed by America, have kept their young people without a voice or the tools to succeed in the modern world.”
Friedman’s ability to leap from such admissions into claiming that an effective way of radically, liberally and revolutionarily combating the regional “terrorism bubble” is to make the citizens of a regime not backed by America “Suck. On. This” (Charlie Rose, 5/30/03) is merely a testament to the advantages of having a news job in which one is not required to maintain a coherent discourse.
The advantages are further underscored in 2010 when Friedman (7/31/10) concludes that the “short answer” for why the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in response to 9/11 “is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.” That Friedman is never forced to formally retract or even informally amend indisputably offensive and racist statements meanwhile permits him to divert attention from the role of Israel in generating regional rage by accusing the Palestinians of “a collective madness” (1/18/04).
Friedman’s reaction to 9/11 merits examination, as it is this event that propels his condescension vis-à-vis Arabs and Muslims to new heights and further convinces him of his own pedagogical role in the world. This conviction is highlighted in its earlier, less overtly bellicose stages by Edward Said, who notes in his 1989 essay “The Orientalist Express” (Village Voice, 10/17/89) that “Friedman has internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity” in From Beirut to Jerusalem (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989), and that, with an air of “unearned egoism,” he “offers advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.”
‘Enraged’ by security lines
Farrar Straus & Giroux (2002)
The details of Friedman’s 9/11 experience are found in the “Diary” section of Longitudes and Attitudes (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002). He learns of the attacks while in the Tel Aviv suburbs, where he is in the process of retrieving his bathing suit from his taxicab after conducting an interview with Tel Aviv University president Itamar Rabinovich. Returning to Rabinovich’s office, Friedman watches CNN footage for several hours with female university staff, who “kept asking what it would mean for Israel. ‘I don’t know,’ I snapped. ‘It’s World War III,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s much bigger than Israel.’”
It would appear from the paragraphs that follow, however, that World War III is in fact not much bigger than Friedman himself. Feeling “suffocated,” Friedman leaves the office, procures a room at the beachfront Tel Aviv Hilton, refuses his friends’ invitation to dinner, and ultimately goes into labor during a late-night walk by the sea:
It was there, massaged by the Mediterranean breeze, that my head started to clear and I finally gave birth to the thought that had been bothering me most: “What kind of world are my two girls going to grow up in?”
Friedman identifies this as the point at which “I first started to get angry.” The anger progresses into “outrage” when his daughter Orly’s county youth orchestra trip to Italy is canceled on account of 9/11 after she had “practice[d] extra-hard all summer in order to retain her chair in the violin section.” Obstacles are then erected to his daughter Natalie’s class trip to New York City, while Friedman battles the “new world knocking” by
insist[ing] on going to concerts and Baltimore Orioles games, chaf[ing] at the extra searches suddenly imposed at Camden Yards [baseball stadium], and [getting] enraged while standing in long security lines at Dulles Airport.
None of this prevents him from hyping an impending war of civilizations, or from later criticizing Bush for simultaneously discussing the Iraq threat and playing golf—despite Friedman’s recent publication of 10 reasons the Golf Channel is preferable to Middle East news (4/21/02), and his announcement (2/23/03) that “the only survival purchase I’ve made since Code Orange is a new set of Ben Hogan Apex irons.”
‘A spiritual value and role model’
Farrar Straus & Giroux (1999)
This is a good place to point out just how convenient is Friedman’s failure to unambiguously address or unreservedly condemn the “very stupid and bad things [the US has done] over the years in just about every corner of the world” (Longitudes and Attitudes), for which he compensates with statements ranging from “Without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle” (10/8/02) to “America, at its best, is not just a country. It’s a spiritual value and role model” (Lexus and the Olive Tree, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999).
Slightly more colorful examples of US influence occur in The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
The Malaysians go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Qataris go to Taco Bell for the same reason Americans go to Universal Studios—to see the source of their fantasies.
By glossing over the recent history of the United States, a country aptly characterized by Martin Luther King, Jr., as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” Friedman (1/4/06) is able to declare that “the US is not a predatory power,” and to propose (10/10/09) that Barack Obama share the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize with “the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century—the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.” In the hypothetical acceptance speech to the Nobel committee that he drafts for Obama, Friedman does not list as one of the century’s notable peacekeeping efforts the secret unleashing of the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on neutral Cambodia in the 1970s, although he does cite present US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite, for example, massive civilian casualties and continued attacks by US helicopter gunships on Afghan children gathering wood.
It is presumably thanks in part to contextual amputation that Friedman is able to avoid pondering how “outraged” he would feel if Orly and Natalie, as opposed to having their travels to Europe and New York temporarily curtailed by security concerns, were instead obliterated by an airborne component of the US military or its adopted Israeli counterpart. He meanwhile acknowledges that his anger over 9/11, “to be honest … wasn’t only about my kids,” but rather about the violation of the idea that “no matter how crazy the world was out there, America was my cocoon that I could always crawl back into.”
‘Enemies of civilization’
As for populations that dare not desire their own cocoons, it is useful to mention such statistics as that over 700 Pakistani civilians were killed in 2009 alone by US drone strikes, which Friedman (11/10/02) has previously proclaimed are “sometimes…the only way justice gets done.” Given that Friedman inhabits a political and journalistic circle in which the denomination “bad guys” is deemed a valid component of wartime discourse, it is logical that the term “civilians” may at times be found to be unnecessarily specific. However, Arab and Muslim civilian casualties generally have a higher chance of being advertised as such if their demise has been wrought by other Arabs and Muslims, especially if the wringing can be invoked (7/4/07) to prove that “a death cult has taken root in the bosom” of Islam and that “this cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization.”
The monopoly that Friedman and his ilk enjoy over derivatives of the Latin root “civ” means that he is not required to explain how it is that events like the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Jenin in 2002—which Friedman (3/31/02) quite literally encourages—does not infringe on civilizational norms. Instead, he uses a post-Jenin dispatch (4/24/02) to argue that, because a book by a Chinese mother about how to get your child into Harvard has sold more than 1.1 million copies in China, while the “normally intelligent” Saudi ambassador to the UK has merely published a poem praising an 18-year-old female Palestinian suicide bomber, China “will eventually build Harvards of its own,” while Saudi “priorities will be too messed up.” Where Tiananmen Square lies on the continuum of civilization is not addressed.
Attorney General John Ashcroft: “Not completely crazy in his impulse to adopt unprecedented, draconian measures.”
Friedman’s classification of Al Qaeda as “enemies of civilization” in an article in 2001 (12/2/01) meanwhile enables him to defend the selective curtailment of civil liberties in the United States:
Attorney General John Ashcroft is not completely crazy in his impulse to adopt unprecedented, draconian measures and military courts to deal with suspected terrorists.
Friedman does not appear to detect any sort of irony in denouncing terrorist flaunting of the American legal system while he himself is engaged in deliberate fear-mongering on behalf of the subversion of justice:
Let’s not forget what was surely the smile on those hijackers’ faces as they gunned the engines on our passenger planes to kill as many Americans as possible in the World Trade Center. Let’s not forget what they would do had they had access to even bigger weapons. And let’s not forget how long they lived among us and how little they absorbed—how they went to their deaths believing that American laws were only something to be eluded.
That it is not always easy to tell who is and is not a civilian is clear from Friedman’s assessment (11/23/01) at the start of the US war on terror:
Think of all the nonsense written in the press—particularly the European and Arab media—about the concern for “civilian casualties” in Afghanistan. It turns out many of those Afghan “civilians” were praying for another dose of B-52’s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.
By allegedly sanctioning their own immolation, then, Afghan civilians earn the right to appear in quotation marks. (What they might be in unpunctuated form is debatable. Martyrs, perhaps?)
Our columnist does not explain how he has obtained this particular insight into Afghan prayers, although seasoned readers might expect him to credit Middle East expert—and Friedman’s designated “soul brother” (Lexus and the Olive Tree)—Stephen P. Cohen, or else to excerpt a lengthy passage translated by “the invaluable MEMRI research service” (10/16/01), the Zionist propaganda arm upon which Friedman relies for quotes from enlightened Arab and Muslim scholars confirming Arab and Muslim defects.
In the end, Friedman cites both Cohen and MEMRI, but not in reference to the prayers; Cohen remarks on Friedman’s insistence on a war of ideas in the Arab/Muslim world, and MEMRI translates a “remarkable essay” by a Kuwaiti professor, according to which Arab Muslims are variously masters of terrorism, the ignorant and intolerant laughingstock of the world, and the recipients of the following “clear” message from the West: “Mend your ways or else.”
A ‘neighborhood beyond transformation’
Friedman’s incessant repetition of the mantra that “people do not change when you tell them they should, but when they tell themselves they must,” occasionally attributed to his “intellectual soul mate” Michael Mandelbaum (6/23/09), has not inhibited the steady issuance of his own personal threats to the Arab/Muslim world. These range from anti–suicide terrorism lectures such as “No matter how bad, your life is sacred” (9/13/01)—although apparently less so when on the receiving end of prayer-answering B-52s—to the pronouncement in 2005 (9/28/05) that, unless the “moral vacuum in the Sunni Arab world” is rectified and Iraqi Sunnis cease engaging in ethnic cleansing, an unsurprising result of the US invasion, the United States “should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.” The latter threat, accompanied by the assessment that “maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation,” occurs a mere two and a half years into Friedman’s war for democracy, which he has repeatedly warned will be an extremely long and difficult process.
In keeping with his optimistic nature, however—which, Friedman (5/11/08) tells us, has been attributed by Israeli general Uzi Dayan to his diminutive stature and the fact that he can “only see that part of the glass that’s half full”—Friedman (7/14/09) strives to maintain an upbeat outlook in the face of mounting evidence of Arab failure to internalize the proper aspirations, and lauds Iraqi exposure to the “melting pot of US soldiers” whose “million acts of kindness and…profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together” are deemed to more than compensate for crimes of torture and Abu Ghraib.
As late as 2010, Friedman (3/9/10) defends the smashing of the country on the grounds that “Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right,” and that democracy simply “was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq.”
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