A few months ago, Tom Friedman was on Charlie Rose talking about the Egyptian revolution and said he had been in Cairo and the buildings looked "60 years" behind modern buildings. The Egyptian economy, he was saying, was frozen by dictatorship.
I grabbed an envelope to scribble the comment down, then did nothing with it. But the other day Friedman was on All Things Considered, talking about his latest book, when he said that the Arab revolutions would be sorting themselves out for the next "100 years."
This is all just neoliberal code for Arab backwardness. Yes, Egyptian society has been stymied by a dictator. Yes, it is a traditional society that is undergoing huge changes. Yes, the revolution will be sorting itself out for a long time -- 25 years, I believe Issandr El-Amrani suggested, at the 92d Street Y a few months back. Our revolution took a long time to sort out. But some of the good changes are going to happen right now...
The idea that it will take 100 years is just Friedman's way of putting the Arab world on ice as backward and no-account and bedeviled by Islamism.
And yes I wonder how much of this attitude is driven by love of Israel-- so evolved it doesn't need to revolve.
The West, especially powers that were historically colonial like Britain, France, Germany, including the US, scrambled to arrest the revolutionary momentum that started in Tunisia and quickly swept Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
The fear among these western powers is for there to be geographic contiguity characterized by freedom and independence in the Arab world, stretching from Morocco to Iraq.
NATO’s involvement in Libya and ongoing clandestine operations in Syria are the typical knee-jerk response of the west to divide and control the region. Nu’man Abd al-Wahid’s article link to mondoweiss.net, provides the historical background for such colonial meddling in the affairs of Arabs in the Middle East.
In a sentence, the Arab Spring has been hijacked and co-opted by Western powers in order to stymie the new wave of revolutions, independence and self-determination.
So, within this context, Tom Friedman’s comments are both irrelevant and instructive. He is simply echoing Israel’s (i.e. the West’s) hope/plan for these revolutions to fail. And with Zionists like Friedman, Arabs are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Avi, you’re back! been asking about where you disappeared to…..your voice was missed.
I second Danaa.
I’m not sure who appointed Tom Friedman Pop Prophet. He doesn’t even bother to use logic or scholarship in his daffy analyses. While he famously equated the Tea Party with Hizbollah, he apparently doesn’t find that it (and the majority who believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs 6000 years go) are putting our nation at risk of being a backward nation. Or his friends the hilltop settlers who believe much the same things. In Friedman’s view Dominionism and Zionism do not stop us from being modern, enlightened democracies, but the Muslim equivalent equals backwardness.
Tom Friedman is Pop Prophet for the parents of the kids Max Blumenthal filmed in Israel, which is why he doesn’t have to know history and he can keep his job.
Tom is a prisoner (a willing prisoner) of Zionist entitlement-theory. The NYT chose him to speak this line, and possibly requires him to espouse it. The readers of NYT (especially but not only of Tom’s effluvia) are prisoners of NYT’s espousement of Zionist entitlement-theory.
To stop being prisoners, each player, NYT, Tom, readers, must learn to discern and dare to fight off or ignore or get out from under its masters.
Poor Tom has always been behind. If you want to get a sense of what people used to think, read his columns to learn what Tom’s thoughts are today.
“A few months ago, Tom Friedman was on Charlie Rose talking about the Egyptian revolution and said he had been in Cairo and the buildings looked “60 years” behind modern buildings.”
Friedman’s being generous here. To me, some of those Cairo buildings look at least 4000 years behind the times. Yet one only has to travel the few hundred miles to Jerusalem to see their very antithesis. For there, a sinuous, linear structure sweeps across the landscape for mile after mile like a dazzling white snake. Its sleek, vertical concrete form imposes itself on all around it, the very embodiment of the “shock of the new”. Yet at the same time, it has a timeless quality. For surely this is building built to last, that will speak of the triumph of a great civilisation for hundreds of generations to come. Though like all great buildings it has a sense of mystery. Who can doubt that in thousands of years time, people will look upon it with wonder and ask “Who built this? And why?”
One can try to be flippant and say that by such markers, Dubai is more advanced than Israel.
I think that a better line of response is: how a particular argument applies to Apartheid? This one applies perfectly, White-dominated South Africa was superior in technology, architecture etc. compared to indigenes and surrounding countries.
Joseph Conrad described how we can progress from “shining light among nations” to “exterminate all the brutes”.
thanks Libra, beautiful statement.
Thanks so much libra for highlighting the exceptionalism of the “sinuous, linear structure [that] sweeps across the landscape for mile after mile” only a few hundred miles from Cairo and what this architectural marvel says about the generosity of spirit of the people that built it.
Look what Dubai did in 1/2 the time, and as with the history of the Arabs for over a millennia, the architecture and engineering firsts (feats) to produce it are ahead of the rest of the world.
Go to the Bauhaus for its photography, not for its hideously utilitarian architecture.
So Freidman thinks the Arabs are 100 years behind us?
Well that isn’t so bad for the Arabs considering the zios and Israelis are 1,930 years behind us despite the fact of our spending trillions to try to bring them up to snuff.
I think the Arabs will catch up before the zios do, in fact I don’t think the zios will ever catch up. They have a learning disability.
This is all just neoliberal code for Arab backwardness. Yes, Egyptian society has been stymied by a dictator. Yes, it is a traditional society that is undergoing huge changes. Yes, the revolution will be sorting itself out for a long time — 25 years, I believe Issandr El-Amrani suggested, at the 92d Street Y a few months back. Our revolution took a long time to sort out. But some of the good changes are going to happen right now…
The idea that it will take 100 years is just Friedman’s way of putting the Arab world on ice as backward and no-account and bedeviled by Islamism.”
So basically, your belief that the Arab revolutions will take 25 years to sort out is not racist, but Tom Friedman’s belief that it will take 100 is. That’s pretty silly, Phil, not to mention self-righteous.
Learn to READ, hophmi.
Phil did not say 25 years.
Issandr El-Amrani did. Phil agrees with Issandr El-Amrani’s analysis.
100 years? That’s an insult. A throw-away line. A flippant, dismissive comment to make that is informed by Tom Friedman’s imperial world-view.
It’s not silly to analyze the Arab spring. It’s silly to think that it will take 100 years. I’m sure Friedman and other like-minded Establishment types will want that for the Arab world though.
Phil isn’t being self-righteous, he’s being reasonable.
You have no filter, hophmi, and you aren’t sincere enough to THINK about what you write. When are you going to back up your bullshit claim that “Palestinians supported Hitler”?
I take it then, that you believe Arabs are backwards people, hophmi? That’s my take-away from your spirited defense of Friedman.
“This is all just neoliberal code for Arab backwardness. Yes, Egyptian society has been stymied by a dictator. ”
That conclusion is your projection. It will take the US 100 years to recover from the misguided economic policies of the Bush presidency. Is that saying that the US is 100 years behind Israel?
100 years to sort out the Arab Spring. Its probably 30. As it is probably 30 years until a bi-national federation in Israel/Palestine is possible.
I saw Annie Hall for the first time in 20 or so years. In a dozen jokes Woody Allen’s character describes some wrong as anti-semitism. His friend asked, “why do you see anti-semitism under every rock? They were just making an innocent comment.”
Richard, with all respect. I read your post a number of times. What is your point?
As Ellen says.
To Phil, “you see slights against Arabs under every rock”, where they are there, and where they aren’t.
And you refuse to turn over those rocks
Your arguments are weak as usual, Dick.
I remember when you compared the apartheid wall (from a picture, in which a Palestinian woman was driving alongside endlessly it seemed) to a tunnel you rode through in New Hampshire or something.
It was obscene, and similarly your parallel to a Woody Allen meme, is obscene.
You don’t consider Palestinians to be human beings or at the least, deserving of the same rights as Jews. Hence, you support the Nakba (while simultaneously downplaying it’s validity/logistics and dismissing its historical legacy as ‘academic’) and condemn the removal of illegal Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories.
“and condemn the removal of illegal Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories.”
If you changed the word “condemn” to vehemently oppose, then that would be the only true statement in your paragraph above.
The comment on the pictures of the wall, was that the pictures were not effective in communicating the imposition of the wall, as I experienced similar on route 95 in Connecticut, protecting property from public view.
That you didn’t distinguish that I was talking about the effectiveness of the image, rather than a knee-jerk rah-rah for the hoped emotional programmed response, indicates that my point was a relevant one.
You say you “vehemently oppose” the removal of illegal Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories. Surely you don’t mean Jews are entitled to take any land they want or build anywhere they please in the occupied territories. In your opinion, are there any circumstances in which Jews are not entitled to seize a hilltop in the West Bank and start building houses?
Those few individual settlers that forced Palestinians from their homes and took them by force, should not be permitted to.
Those that believed that they were buying property that was theirs, should be allowed to remain in their homes, and the Israeli government should pay either individual Palestinians and/or some Palestinian development organization for the institutional transfer of land.
Its the state effort that is illegal. The individuals are just civilians.
>> Richard Witty September 10, 2011 at 9:59 pm
RW is attempting to reach out here, but his reach is very limited.
The “state effort” is, without question, illegal. But there’s only so much innocence that individuals can be permitted to feign.
———————
The man on the corner sells little packets of white powder he claims is just sugar. Many people have bought it and the word is out that the powder is actually cocaine.
So I go to buy some. I ask the man to confirm that it’s sugar, ’cause I don’t want to get caught buying coke! The man assures me its just sugar. I buy a packet. It’s a bit pricey for sugar, but the man was convincing.
On the way home, I get stopped by a cop and arrested for cocaine possession. “But the nice man assured me it was just sugar! There’s NO WAY I could have known it wasn’t!”
“Yeah, sure, buddy. Sure you didn’t know.”
———————
How many Israelis purchasing homes / land in the Occupied Territories – outside of the 1948 borders and outside of the 1967 borders – could honestly believe “that they were buying property that was theirs”?
Don’t presume, actually find out what they thought.
I’ve seen dozens of interviews with those that bought condominiums on the east of the green line that declared that they understood that they were simply buying an apartment commuting distance from their work.
>> I’ve seen dozens of interviews with those that bought condominiums on the east of the green line that declared that they understood that they were simply buying an apartment commuting distance from their work.
Police conducted dozens of inteviews with those who bought cocaine from the nice man. Each person insisted that he was assured that he was buying sugar. “There’s NO WAY I could have known it wasn’t!” each person exclaimed.
Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. In the US, and I assume most rational nations, if you “buy” a house from someone who doesn’t have the right to sell it to you, you don’t get to keep the house. You have to vacate. That’s why title insurance was created, so that if you end up not really having title to the house, you are insured against losing the money you put into it. You vacate and get compensated. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case for illegal settlers, regardless of whether they claim or feign ignorance.
You know, if you used the same terminology for half of the Jewish world population that perished in concentration camps, as you do for half the original population of Palestine that was attacked under a similar rational, you would be a Holocaust denier, Witty.
“And yes I wonder how much of this attitude is driven by love of Israel– so evolved it doesn’t need to revolve.”
Everything Friedman writes about the middle east and basically anything else he writes about “is driven by love of Israel” A blind and racist love for Israel
I also heard that interview. NPR promotes Friedman quite often. Sure wish they would mix up their guest list a bit. And their program host attitudes also.
link to npr.org
“FRIEDMAN: Well, we understand the political system is gridlocked. You know, I would argue one of our political parties, the Republican Party today in particular – and we are independents; is not a political book – but they’ve really gone off the rails in a certain way. And that’s why, you know, if you look at what’s going on today, Robert, in America, we’re having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election and it’s like they don’t even overlap.
And what we argue is that’s because the incentives of politics today – money, gerrymandered districts – are so misaligned with the needs of the country that they become like a closed circle, operating on their own. And something has got to break through that. And what we argue for is an independent third party that actually can show that there is a huge middle in this country that demands a different politics.
SIEGEL: You go out of your way to end on an upbeat note in the book, and say that you – do you really feel optimistic? I mean, do you really look around at Washington and the economy and say, yeah, we’re going to come out of this okay?
FRIEDMAN: Drugs, Robert.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FRIEDMAN: A lot of drugs.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You’re self-medicating.”
Guy Raz had the war criminal Douglas Feith on tonight. The Bush administration war criminals are popping up all over the place. Feith said something about the 9/11 terrorist wanting to “cause mass destruction” Hey Dougie boy do you feel anything about all of the loss of life in Iraq that you are partially responsible for? Clearly not. Another psychopath gone wild.
Guy Raz did not ask him one really challenging question about his role in creating, dessiminating the false WMD intelligence. Weak. Guy Raz promoting war criminals. Giving them a second chance. Feith has slipped back through the cracks over and over again
link to npr.org
Or as some of the people really in the know like Gen Tommy Franks who called Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” You know one of the thugs willing to send your relatives to war based on a “pack of lies” that he was instrumental in making up.
Maybe NPR’s Guy Raz needs to do a bit more reading about Feith’s direct role in the false intelligence and other serious mishaps having to do with the unnecessary and immoral invasion of Iraq.
Douglas Feith
What has the Pentagon’s third man done wrong? Everything.
By Chris SuellentropPosted Thursday, May 20, 2004, at 6:56 PM ET
Listen to Chris Suellentrop discuss this article on Day to Day here. Listen to Douglas Feith’s response here.
link to slate.com
Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith—who, as the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.
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It’s not that the 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq. He’s only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, for example. (Though it’s a significant tangent: An anonymous “Pentagon insider” told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam’s WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.) Nor was it Feith who made the decision to commit fewer troops than the generals requested. (Though Feith did give the most honest explanation for the decision, saying last year that it “makes our military less usable” if hundreds of thousands of troops are needed to fight wars.) But if he isn’t fully culpable for all these fiascos, he’s still implicated in them somehow. He’s a leading indicator, like a falling Dow—something that correlates with but does not cause disaster.”
Guy Raz had the war criminal Douglas Feith on tonight.
Followed by George Packer, who nailed what Douglas-Feith-on-a-book-tour left out. That’s one NPR clip you should go searching for. (While you’re at it, search for the interview of the guy who wrote BLUR.)
Though it’s a significant tangent: An anonymous “Pentagon insider” told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam’s WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.
Wolfowitz made the claim years ago that “we” chose WMD as a reason to go to war because that’s what the American people would accept. He said it in Vanity Fair in 2003.
link to smh.com.au
and Tom Friedman is 60 paces behind the flow of history
I’ve been hobnobbing around the “Cultures of Resistance” website and have been thinking lately about the Palestinian culture of resistance. I saw a documentary on two girls in the West Bank who were trying to learn to rap a while ago. In the doc, several adults were debating as to whether rap is a legitimate form of resistance.
And I couldn’t help by being struck by the fact that parents were most proud of children that were involved in resistance, and they wanted that for their children.
And I think that is a very stark contrast to my own culture. There is only a very small culture of resistance here in the US, at least as I’ve experienced in my own white, middle-class upbringing. I do see it in some function in black culture, especially with resistance to policing, militarization, and imprisonment. But within the culture that I have been raised, parents are most proud of children who make money.
So when Friedman talks about Egypt or other regions of the Middle East being “behind,” I really think he is referencing their peoples’ abilities to mobilize their governments (and the military) on behalf of capitalist interests. In that regard, the United States IS the most advanced society in the world. But if we’re judging a society by their morals, by cultures which strive for the realization of justice, then I think the United States is well behind the people of the Middle East.
I find myself thinking of the comment Chinese premier Zhou Enlai made to Kissinger. Kissinger asked Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution. Enlai answered, “It’s too soon to say.”
Absurd that Friedman should (again) be passing judgement on Arab societies when the criticism he makes of them are arguably better directed these days at the United States. Bush and now Obama are marching us into a repression never seen in the US while Friedman and most at the Times and other US media outlets cheer.
“Absurd that Friedman should (again) be passing judgement on Arab societies when the criticism he makes of them are arguably better directed these days at the United States. ”
Apart from the world’s highest building games being played by the UAE and Saudi Arabia because they have the $$$ to play such games, Friedman is not totally wrong in his assessment. While the Arabs are trying to catch up the best they can because the will is there, the others are advancing at a much faster pace.
A review Edward Said did for the Village Voice in 1989:
—
The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps Up the Middle East
On the face of it, From Beirut to Jerusalem is a reporter’s journal of a decade in the Middle East spent first as UPI correspondent for a couple of years, then as New York Times bureau chief in two major centers. Between 1979 and 1984 Friedman was stationed in Beirut where he covered the civil war, the Israeli invasion of 1982, and the country’s tragic dissolution thereafter. He then moved to Jerusalem (traveling rather ostentatiously across the Lebanese-Israeli border with his golf clubs), where he wrote about the Israeli political scene, with particular attention to the intifadah. He remained in Israel until mid-1988. He then returned home to become the Times man in Washington. For his Middle Eastern coverage Friedman won two Pulitzer prizes, both of them, interestingly enough, about major Palestinian events: the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the uprising or intifadah that began in late 1987 and continues to the present.
Friedman is no ordinary reporter, however. He is, as he tells us right from the start, a young American Jew who grew up in Minneapolis, was galvanized into Zionist enthusiasm by the 1967 War, studied Arabic and Jewish history first at Brandeis and then at Oxford, and went on to become a major figure in discussions and policy analysis of the Middle East. The complexity and richness of his personal background thus make Friedman’s book a compendium of autobiography, journalistic reportage, philosophical reflection laced with a political theory whose main idea is that by virtue of their power and enlightened attitudes Israel and the United States set the standards to which in the end the less gifted and culturally backward Arabs must conform. Yet Friedman is also something of a craftsman. From Beirut to Jerusalem, for all its gargantuan length, doesn’t often flag or bog down except, it must be said, when Friedman either gets mushy with testimonials about his feelings, or when he offers advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him. The result is therefore an interesting book, as much a collection of anecdotes as it is clever writing studded with eye-catching but symptomatic bits of analysis.
What keeps it together as a book is Friedman’s own “insider” voice — smart, frequently vulgar and tough, sententious, effortlessly knowledgeable. When Arabs or Jews do things, it is not what they do but how their actions register on Tom’s sensibility that matters. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is a strangely ignorant book: Friedman’s two main sources of illumination are trusted gurus (e.g., the “philosopher” David Hartman, who — we are not told this — runs a strange religious school in Israel largely on U.S. funds; he doesn’t seem to have any “philosophical” works to his credit) or bits of expert and/or folk wisdom, unconnected to specific works or research, asserted rather than argued or proved. I do not disagree with Friedman, for example, in his account of how Hafez al-Assad ruthlessly destroyed Muslim opposition in Hama by massacring thousands of his own citizens; Friedman takes the incident as a case of “Hama Rules” and attributes them to “different political traditions” in the Arab world whose true origin, he pronounces, are such things as a “tribalism” learned in the desert. So astonishing a jump, from modern, predominantly urban Syria to the prehistoric desert, is of course the purest Orientalism, and is of a piece with the moronic and hopelessly false dictum offered later in the book that the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.
These ludicrous reductions do have sources: In the case of tribalism it is the Israeli “Bedouin expert” Clinton Bailey; in the case of the Arab political tradition “Lebanese Shiite scholar” Fouad Ajami. Friedman deploys these ideas disingenuously, as if there wasn’t a fairly active controversy seething in all departments of knowledge about the Middle East. In fact Friedman belongs very clearly on one side, the side associated with classical anti-Arab and anti-Islamic Orientalism, the world according to Bernard Lewis, Ajami, Bailey, and their ilk. Of course Friedman is perfectly entitled to his views, which are not always unsympathetic, but what is particularly shady is that Friedman palms off his opinions (and those of his sources) as reasonable, uncontested, secure. In fact they are minority views and have been under severe attack for several decades now. They represent a narrow consensus associated not with desirable political change but with the equally political, basically conservative perspective of the status quo. People in this camp characterize themselves as pragmatic and realistic, labels that are intended to dismiss the theories of Marxists, non-Western and non-white nationalists, feminists, political economists. The point, of course, is that what Friedman and the Orientalists espouse is a threadbare repertoire of often racist clichés, all of them bearing the marks of colonial knowledge now allied with Naipaulesque disenchantment. People can’t change, Friedman says in effect; they are what they are forever. Give Ahmed, or Sambo, a place in the bus and he’ll simmer down.
But since this is not a scholarly book, one might say, why shouldn’t Friedman traffic in these discredited myths? Because Friedman presents himself as more than a reporter, his book as more than a personal chronicle. No one watching television these days has not seen Friedman, “the expert,” on all the right programs — the detached, impartial, authoritative observer who is a sizable cut above the smaller-scale partisans who are so transparently militant and therefore less credible. From Beirut to Jerusalem is the marketing strategy by means of which a young reporter consciously elevates himself to the rank of foreign policy sage, there to reap rewards and, alas, to recycle the illusions of American power and visionless realism. In the Middle East, he tells us, America should alternate between being “obstetrician, friend, grocer, and a son-of-a-bitch.” Among the prototypes for these largely unattractive roles are Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.
It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner, or his grating indifference to values and principles by which, perhaps misguidedly, Arabs and Jews have believed themselves to be informed. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility — qualities that may explain the book’s quite startling commercial success. It’s as if — and I think this is true of his views on both Arabs and Jews — what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks. Not only is there scarcely a reference in From Beirut to Jerusalem to the latest work on Arab history and society, but Friedman is also quite innocent about the latest in Israeli scholarship that has analyzed the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, or the birth of Israel, or the internal dislocations within Israeli society.
I do not want to suggest that Friedman is nowhere capable of uncompromising analysis — his remarks on the creepy similarity between Labour and Likud parties are especially trenchant — or that he flinches when it comes to reporting the dreadful, virtually insensate ugliness of recent Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. He is clear about these matters, but he feels somehow that his prized sensibility, saying one thing in one breath and then contradicting it in the next, can carry the whole burden of interpretation and evaluation. And underlying his overestimated sensibility is a patronizing attitude toward all the little people who do not have quite his olympian perspective. Israeli Jews, he tells us in one passage, are closer to the West because their symbol, the star, is close to the cross, “both of which are full of sharp, angled turns. The symbol of the Muslim East is the crescent moon — a wide, soft, ambiguous arc.” From such entirely dubious materials he draws
conclusions roughly equivalent in explanatory power to theories about a natural sense of rhythm among inferior races that have been discredited at least since World War II. A little later in the book Friedman informs Palestinians that they do not belong to the “biblical super story through which the West looks at the world” — when you come to think of it, not many people have that privilege — and they are “lucky” to have had the Jews as their enemy.
Inside this serenely untroubled cocoon of the purest race prejudice the Friedmanian sensibility ambles from subject to subject. When he arrives finally at the vexed problem of press coverage, he warns us that the media are unfair in their relentless fixation on Israel (this from the journalist-author of a 600-page book on the subject), then he compliments the Israelis on manipulating the media brilliantly, then he blathers on about Israeli troops beating up three-year-olds, and how that vigorous form of outdoor exercise provides them with self-knowledge! Friedman seems to have no inkling that people were and have been killed or beaten when he and his media colleagues were not there to report the story, or that such things as imperialism, or demography, or conflicting ideas played a role while he wasn’t around to comment on the case. He does not seem quite to have apprehended that other peoples besides Westerners with sharp-angled symbols and superstories might have had a sense of nationhood, or that when a whole society is shattered and its people dispersed and stripped of their lands, it might on its own, without a Biblical superstory or a sharp Western symbol, try to reforge itself and create a new independent society.
One would not fault as seriously From Beirut to Jerusalem for its numerous shortcomings were it not that as a collection of anecdotes or as a report on his own apparently omnicompetent sensibility Friedman’s writing aspires to an almost regal authority and inclusiveness. There is little self-irony, no twinge of doubt in what he ladles out; mockery and sarcasm are reserved entirely for local Arabs and Jews, not for earnest Times reporters. Read his prescriptions at the end of the book and you will quickly realize 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. Do this, he tells the Israelis; do this, he tells the Palestinians; do this, he tells the Americans — and anyone else who happens to be listening in. His formulas suggest that everyone should try for limits and realism, except, of course, Friedman himself.
His book would have been more interesting had his account of himself included some narrative of how he achieved such awesome powers, or of how being a reporter for the Times in the Middle East elevates one to institutional status, or of how the selection of what’s fit to print (for example, Friedman’s use of the word indiscriminate to describe Israel’s 1982 bombing of Beirut was removed by then Times editor A. M. Rosenthal; Friedman makes no mention of the episode in his book) has a lot to do with what is considered “important” by various powers and interests. I would have also liked to read his opinion of the wall-to-wall coverage of terrorist Shaikh Obeid’s kidnapping in which the fact that Israel has been in military occupation of a handsome swathe of South Lebanon is almost totally suppressed by the Times and all the other independent U.S. media, along with the fact that although Obeid is an unattractive clerical zealot, he hasn’t been concretely accused of any greater or more specific “terrorism” than fighting the Israeli military who have taken over his homeland. Or then again I’d like to have read Friedman’s account of how the Times‘s editorial pages are dominated by the opinions of William Safire and A. M. Rosenthal (whom Friedman credits with having helped his career), opinions about the Muslims and Arabs that could not be printed about any other people on earth.
A treatment of these facts would have been fairer and perhaps less grand than asking Arabs and Jews to bear the brunt of Friedman’s ponderous judgments on their infractions and departures from the essences and fates decreed for them by Friedman and his dubious authorities. Yet despite the distorting prism of his official self, Friedman does indeed have an understanding of how people hang on — e.g., the young Palestinian defenders of Beirut in 1982 — or of how a self-serving myth of victimization still controls the Israeli self-image. Compassion and affection thus occasionally get through Friedman’s remorseless machine, but the really curious thing is how little he seems to be interested in these genuine accomplishments, and how much more determined he is to be an all-knowing White Father composing the ultimate how-to-do-it book for the Middle East.