I Didn’t Read It But

a friend tells me that this New Yorker profile of Tom Friedman gives him a pass on his Iraq War error by not quoting from any of his drum-banging columns back then. I'd have hoped that the author would have scrutinized Friedman's actually brilliant statement in Haaretz about the war being conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals within a mile or so of his office. I imagine not. Also Friedman's famous (to me anyway) statement in Slate that the war was necessary to smash the Arab belief that they could send suicide bombers into Tel Aviv pizza parlors. A grievous error, with a religious root: That is not my war; my country does not gobble Arab land and push Arabs off it. Indeed, my country has now overlooked suicide terrorism–in the country Friedman urged it to occupy– as a political tool. No, the necessary battle among Jews over Iraq-and-Zionism was, I gather, in no wise advanced by the New Yorker–which after all has some dogs in the fight. Dogs with a crushed larynx and a torn ear or two.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Iraq, US Policy in the Middle East, US Politics

{ 21 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Chuck says:

    Go easy on Tom Friedman. After marrying into the Bucksbaum Family, the founders of General Growth(GGP), and one of the richest families in the world, things have gone downhill recently. Mr Friedman, though lacking in economic credentials, has been focusing on economic events in his writing, which ALWAYS conveniently ignore the devastating impact of the War in Iraq on the American economy.

    It's hard for Friedman not to focus on the economy when General Growth stock has gone from $54 to $2 under his yuppie brother in law, John's management, which apparently violated corporate ethics by lending money to insiders who subsequently received huge margin calls and were wiped out.

    Carolyn Swartz(junkdealer$$)Bucksbaum
    and Matthew Bucksbaum were forced to fire son John, but they are still there to take care of Tom Friedman. Mrs Bucksbaum, a trustee of Grinnell College, has managed to keep the apples polished and the Bucksbaum name on the Fine Arts Building. So Tom Friedman is fortunate to be able to collect a $50,000 honorarium from Grinnell to be next years commencement speaker. That probably covers the real estate taxes on his wife's $10 million dollar home for one month but hey, with GGP almost down the tubes, every penny counts. And what's a struggling writer supposed to do anyway with $3.9 billion down the drain?

  2. peters says:

    someone, please, please, go after the new yorker. it has been bad but this issue was the worst. there was rehabilitating freedman's reputation, basicly allowing him to claim he had not beat the war drum. then there was the profile of the goldman sachs guy that ended with the dumb waspy guy ruining the company and the subject saving it because he was jewish. i'm not kidding.
    a year ago remnick canned walt and meersheimer in the opening talk of the town. of course jeffrey goldburg was their favorite writer for a while. i can't swear to it but i don't think they have profiled a gentile in years. generally the profiles are about a jewish billionaire, and a billionaire with no redeeming value as well. this is a bastion for the neolibs. jewish neolibs, if i need to say so.

  3. peters says:

    someone, please, please, go after the new yorker. it has been bad but this issue was the worst. there was rehabilitating freedman's reputation, basicly allowing him to claim he had not beat the war drum. then there was the profile of the goldman sachs guy that ended with the dumb waspy guy ruining the company and the subject saving it because he was jewish. i'm not kidding.
    a year ago remnick canned walt and meersheimer in the opening talk of the town. of course jeffrey goldburg was their favorite writer for a while. i can't swear to it but i don't think they have profiled a gentile in years. generally the profiles are about a jewish billionaire, and a billionaire with no redeeming value as well. this is a bastion for the neolibs. jewish neolibs, if i need to say so.

  4. Ed says:

    Weiss: "Friedman's famous (to me anyway) statement to Slate that the war was necessary to smash the Arab belief that they could send suicide bombers into Tel Aviv pizza parlors. A grievous error, with a religious root: For this is not my war; my country does not gobble Arab land and push Arabs off it. Indeed, my country has overlooked suicide terrorism in the country Friedman urged it to occupy as a political tool."

    Weiss, you and Friedman live in two different countries, two different worlds. Friedman lives in the Nation of Zion that exists *within* America and *within* the Levant, and that's where his loyalties lie. I'm sure from his perspective, he believes himself to be patriotic — he just refuses to openly admit that it's Zionist patriotism. Same with all the other fanatical Jewish Zionists in America.

    As the saying goes, “You can't serve two masters,” and fanatical Jewish-American Zionists don't. But they also know they can never admit this. So they feign loyalty to America when it suits their purposes, and vicously attack America when it doesn't. When all aid is ended to Israel, we'll see who's who.

  5. Ed says:

    PS: It is possible to be simultaneously a Jewish Zionist and a loyal America, but it is so extremely rare as to be statistically insignificant. The only intellectual that I’ve ever seen pull it off is Paul Gottfried, and he’s a paleocon. There's really probably no other way to do it. And there is most certainly no "liberal" or "conservative" way to do it without turning into an Israel first Neolib or Neocon. Anyone who is both "liberal" or "conservative" and Jewish and who wants to be a loyal American must choose between Zionism and ant-Zionism, as Weiss has.

  6. Richard Witty says:

    "A grievous error, with a religious root: For this is not my war; my country does not gobble Arab land and push Arabs off it. "

    Arab land? That seems like an unusually tribal definition. Doesn't it to you?

  7. anon says:

    Perhaps we should be guided by Israel. There you don't get a chance
    to do anything about assumed dual loyalty. No Arab-Israeli swing vote allowed, no non-Druze Arab in the IDF. Rights of intermarried couples very limited. And so on.

  8. anon says:

    "The Jewish state" would be official, and also super-tribal.

  9. Jacqueline_Hyde says:

    The New Yorker is the Lizard People's top tier catapult. They're golden baby! That's not a plate of road kill man, that's lamb brisket.

    Funny cartoons, though.

  10. anon says:

    But Truman did just that, gobble Arab land and pushed Arabs off it, and he did know what he was doing:

    Though Jews generally regarded Truman as a friend for his support for the creation of Israel, one diary entry, dated July 28, 1947 reflects he knew what he was doing to non-Jews.

    After a 10-minute conversation on postwar immigration to Palestine with Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Treasury secretary under Franklin D. Roosevelt and then briefly under Truman before becoming chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947, the president wrote, ''The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs.''

    ''The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish,'' he continued. ''They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated'' as displaced persons, ''as long as the Jews get special treatment.''

    The unassuming blue-covered diary was a gift to Truman from the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, and bears the label ''1947 Diary and Manual of the Real Estate Board of New York.''

  11. agog says:

    The New Yorker has well and truly lost the plot under David Remnick but its readership has been slow to to twig to it. It has been reduced to little more than a neo-lib doppelganger to Commentary and yet is still taken seriously by the commentariat and its aspirational, not-as- well-educated-as-they-think subscribers.

    In this context is the Emanuel appointment really that much of a surprise? The US has become a deeply weird country and election Obama will not change that, it seems now. How quickly the euphoria fades…

    If the stakes weren't so high I would find the whole surreal spectacle amusing but, in fact, it's not funny.

  12. Doppler says:

    I wish someone would write about how the New Yorker makes its editorial decisions, rather than just reacting to them. Maybe Stephen Bloom from Iowa should take on the job.

    But he may be busy writing about Sholom Rubashkin's indictment and Agriprocessor's bankruptcy. Will he ask the question whether the bankruptcy filing was good faith insolvency, or bad faith pay back to the goyim for indicting him?

    Here's some other questions truth seekers need to but don't address: Why does the press not touch the AIPAC trial? Why do the NeoCons continue to get a pass in the press (for example, how can William Kristol maintain status as a New York Times intellectual columnist after promoting disaster after disaster – from Iraq to Sarah Palin)? What is the source of his outsized influence, and how exactly does it work?

  13. anon says:

    Doppler, the reason is Jewish networking. Plus, applied to the more independent Jews, don't air dirty jewish laundry in (goy) public. This is the fear factor added on top of the ethnic solidarity factor. It is very un-American in nature, unless you include the Mafia.

  14. anon says:

    The Ancient Egyptians had their own version of the Jews, not that any Westerners know of it, although I did see a program on the Military channel recently that echoed the Egyptian version, with all interviewed sources being–Israeli Jews. In capsule, the Jews liked their status as a military ally of Egypt, but then the Egyptian leaders decided they didn't need the Israelites,who were always annoying them, and they demoted them to the same status as other tribes or nations they had power over, i.e., they were by default reduced to paid employees for large Egyptian public works projects, not slaves at all,but basically blue collar federal workers with health benefits etc. Lead Jews did not like to be part of
    this like to be blue collar workers rather than essentially part of the
    Egyptian higher status military elite. So they decided to get the f–k out of Egypt. They pillaged and took all from an Egyptian town to supply themselves, and hatted out. Egypt pursued them for this criminal violence.

    The kosher meat company Agriprocessors filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday after a week in which the company was hit with massive fines, lawsuits and arrests. If you ever wanted to see the Talmud in action in the postmodern age, you need to check out what happened in Iowa.

  15. Ed says:

    Does anybody well-versed on the Jewish Zionist issue even doubt anymore that diaspora Jewish Zionists operate in America as their own quasi nation with their own sets of values, ethics, and morals, their own notions of patriotism, and their own institutions — some of which parallel and employ gentile interests and most of which don't, media included?

    How can any group pursuing an agenda deeply hostile to the best interests of 98% of Americans ever complain of discrimination? It's the equivalent of gang-bangers on a robbery spree complaining that they are just trying to make a living, and the cops are singling them out for being criminals.

  16. Anonymous says:

    Postville, a fast-forwarded microlevel allegory of America…

    And I wonder if that place will ever receive any attention after the rubaskinners leave except as a reminder of the disastrous social and economic consequences of antisemitism.

  17. anon says:

    Iowa, which though mostly white voted for Obama, had a problem with Postville's new jews. If you ever thought that anti-semitism was merely a mental disease, rather than tied in with jewish conduct, you need to bone up on what's kosher and how it came be that way, and why non-jews in a small town town in America caught a whiff of the historical problem.

  18. peters says:

    doppler,
    i am very interested in HOW it works. is there a gentlemen's agreement between editor and publisher not to print anything critical of jews, neocons, or israel? is it spoken of openly? or is it one of those things you just know? are probing journalists taken to task or just not published, faded from the scene?
    a jewish friend who also writes told me that it is careerism. that you don't want to alienate your sources in the government, you want to be invited to parties by the in crowd. i don't really buy this explanation.

  19. peters says:

    doppler,
    i am very interested in HOW it works. is there a gentlemen's agreement between editor and publisher not to print anything critical of jews, neocons, or israel? is it spoken of openly? or is it one of those things you just know? are probing journalists taken to task or just not published, faded from the scene?
    a jewish friend who also writes told me that it is careerism. that you don't want to alienate your sources in the government, you want to be invited to parties by the in crowd. i don't really buy this explanation.

  20. anon says:

    Peters, all of the above; they are not inconsistent you must see.

  21. D. says:

    "Postville, a fast-forwarded microlevel allegory of America…"

    Agreed. It has everything. When the animal cruelty story broke, I thought that made a nicely symbolic coda for the sorry tale. But the latest twist, the illegal immigrants, so blatantly ties together the whole "hostile elite" theme that you almost think someone, somewhere is intentionally thumbing his nose at the country.

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