Tom Friedman, refreshed and inspired by his recent jaunt to Yemen, writes:
I believe the only way the forces of 1979 can be rolled back would be with another equally big bang — a new popular movement that is truly reformist, democratizing, open to the world, yet anchored in Muslim culture, not disconnected. Our best hopes are the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq, the tentative green revolution in Iran, plus the young reformers now coming of age in every Arab country. But it will not be easy.
The young reformers today “do not have a compelling story to tell,” remarked Lahcen Haddad, a political scientist at Rabat University in Morocco. “And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.
Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.
The problem with viewing the Middle East in terms of competing narratives is that it leads to exactly what Friedman does: present the region’s problems in terms of defective story telling. It discounts the possibility that the most obvious explanation for the iron grip of the so-called meta-narrative is that it provides a fairly good approximation of the truth.
The hold of this story is not a reflection of a weak Arab mind or of limited access to good education but, on the contrary, the facts that the region is indeed mired by autocratic rule, the West is indeed hugely invested in controlling the region’s carbon resources and the only country in the region towards which the West and especially the United States displays an unswerving loyalty is indeed Israel.
Call that an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy if you like, but the name is really just a distraction — a way for Friedman to say: "no truth here… please move along. Come check out my dream of modernity — it could be your dream too. (If only I could figure why you think the way you do… More qat please.)"
But, does Friedman really need Qat to come up with these ridiculous articles?
I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq.
This man, Friedman, is a danger, and a mental disaster. He is incapable of strategic thinking or planning. He has no idea what it is. He does not understand the consequences of tomorrow that arise from the results of actions today, and determine the future.
He is, in short, an idiot. With a powerful platform. That is the curse of American Jews who take pride that one of their own has risen so high, because they are who Mr. Friedman writes for: the powerful Jews who can adopt his childlike view of the world and make it manifest . They follow him at their peril. And that day will arrive.
the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq
lol, trends???? maybe he thinks we don’t know the whole democracy gambit is imploding this very minute in iraq w/al maliki preventing hundreds of candidates from running in the upcoming fast approaching election including the 2 most popular secularists in his own party!
Exactly annie. Iraq is a mess, a nightmare. Over 1 million people dead, a continuing occupation, an entire culture virtually destroyed. And Friedman refers to this as “fragile democratizing trends.” The man is a monster. He has no conscience, no soul.
Friedman is so committed to his dream state that he does not recognize the danger his proposed agenda poses to zionism.
Friedman has, apparently, never let facts get in the way of a story line that serves his purposes.
Reshaping history to fit the desired narrative is at the core of zionism. Arabs and Iranians have strayed from the reservation in their refusal to conform to the Israeli-framed narrative, relying , instead, on observed reality. Solution: don’t change the facts — ie the hasbara that says, Israel is always right (oh, it may make some mistakes now and then, but even it’s army is the most moral army in the world….) — instead, change the narrative.
A lot can be learned about zionists by studying what they do NOT write endless books about; one such topic is the importance of Francis Bacon, who initiated the most profound revolution in western history, a revolution in the way people think. Prior to Bacon, the Aristotelian system held sway, with the Church as the overarching authority that gave rock-solid foundation to the first premise. Bacon refused to give intellectual support to that authority, demanding instead that observed nature, facts on the ground, if you will, serve as the starting point of the application of logic to understand how the world works.
Bacon loved analogies, and used the analogy of ‘ants, spiders, bees’ to roughly categorize various forms of thinking.
Ants busily gather information but are seldom capable of analyzing or using it.
Spiders manufactur information from the substance of their own heads — or dreams — then interpret all of reality based on the particularistic and possibly self-serving internal webs woven. Hasbara is the essence of spider-thinking. Tom Friedman is a spider-thinker.
Bees gather information from nature, analyze it logically, and draw conclusions from fact- and reality-based evidence.
What is most to be admired about the unique nature of the vision of America as conceived by its founding fathers is that they were children and students of Francis Bacon’s Enlightenment revolution; they were not ‘dreamers’ in the sense that they embued the output of their own imaginings with the reality of fact, as does Friedman; rather, they attempted to apply Bacon’s thinking style to the project of observing nature, applying logic, to arrive at the best approximation of truth.
Francis Bacon’s Enlightened thinking is more in line with algebra — the alignment of the bones — as conceived by Persians and Arabs, and thus more universally applicable and true-to-observed nature, than with the shaped-narrative quality of Torah and Talmud, whose avowed purpose is to interpret events to determine, “What does history mean for Jews.”
edit quote: “Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post
-1979zionist alternative story based on responsibility, modernization,IslamicJewish reformation and [most especially, HONEST] cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require [return to ] and success of the …democratizing self-government movements [envisioned by America’s founders inIranthe US of A and a Baconian revolution in the thinking patterns of zionists, together with the implementation of and success of a genuinely democratizing self-governing movement inIraqIsrael. That would spawn a whole new story.I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy. ” end of edited quote
this is easily one of the greatest posts i’ve seen on this site.
thank you.
The founding fathers followed Moorish (Muslim) Science:
link to newdawnmagazine.com
The Muslim world and science and thinking surpassed anything the world had known, much of it lost as this recent BBC documentary discusses.
link to bbc.co.uk
Look what Muslim maritime technology Married to Chinese maritime technology (after Genghis Khan overran China) produced in the late 1300s/early 1400s. The smaller ship is what Columbus’ was 88 years later.
link to en.wikipedia.org
‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.”
count me in, sounds about right to me. i don’t think this narrative is limited to middle easterners, i think it is increasingly becoming clear it is the reality and anyone who doesn’t know it by now has been living under a rock.
Tommie might be channeling the late Laurent Murawiec link to c-spanvideo.org who had to reach into nutsy movements from 12th century Europe to find an historic precedent that would satisfy his compulsion to paint Islam as a religion of evil jihadist proclivities.
Like any good propagandist, as contrasted with honest historian, Murawiec failed to discuss that Islamic states and Christian Europe were engaged in strenuous ECONOMIC struggle for control over shipping in Mediterranean, trade with China, access to Silk Road luxuries, etc. The zionist narrative eliminates the same set of data when discussing Jews in Germany and Europe in late 19th and early 20th century Europe.
This editorial of Friedman appeals to Zionists of course. But it also reinforces the misinformation that maintains the ignorance of the American public. They are dumber that a box of rocks. It is a masterpiece of disingenuousness. What a toady.
I look forward to Friedman’s columns in terms of a “can he top this?” kind of idiocy. He almost always delivers. But there is a method to his madness, and I suspect that the majority of liberals who read the NYT take him seriously, in the same way that they take David Brooks seriously. He often refers to political scientist Michael Mandelbaum for “big ideas.” They are the archetypal “liberals as neocons.” Their vision of social perfection is always around the next violent corner.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man the New York media call “the despised dictator” mingling with the people in a manner no recent U.S. President would dare to do:
link to revisionisthistory.org
Photo from: link to alethonews.wordpress.com
I saw a documentary once where sheep farmers used a llama to walk the sheep into the slaughterhouse. The sheep could sense the danger and would not go through the fencing designed to funnel them into the entrance door to the slaughter unit without the direction of a fellow somewhat similar animal to lead them there and ease their fears … Tom Friedman is the hasbara llama for the American masses
RE: “I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.” – Friedman
ME: I’ve always thought ‘Tommy Boi’ was “dreamy”! (channeling Gidget, lol)