For Hanukkah this year, our chefs prepare a special dish: their own words

Thomas Friedman

Master chef Tom Friedman prepared this dish yesterday, as Hanukkah began:

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told The Jewish Week Tuesday that he regrets writing in his Dec. 13 column (“Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir”) that the standing ovation Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received in Congress this year “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

“In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby — a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to,” Friedman said. “It would have helped people focus on my argument, which I stand by 100 percent.”

Joe Klein’s recipe, a few days back:

A few hours ago, I received an anguished email from my friend Jeff Goldberg, who was incensed that I’d written this sentence:

“It’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.” [emphasis his]

Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion. I was concerned about sending American kids off to war yet again. I separated the phrase with commas in order to emphasize the too-many-times we’ve sent our troops overseas in the past decade. It might have been more accurate if I’d written “to send American kids off to war yet again–this time, to fight for Israel’s national security.” Which I believe is what the warmongering against Iran is all about. But the thought that we’d gone to war in the past, especially in Iraq, to fight for Israel’s national security was nowhere in my mind. Nowhere. I don’t believe we’ve ever gone to war to fight for Israel’s national security. Period.

1. Richard Goldstone in ’09 upon releasing his famous report accusing Israel of extensive war crimes in its attack on Gaza in ’08-’09:

“I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing factory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up by Israeli tank bulldozers. I saw chicken farms, for egg production, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of chickens killed. I met with families who lost their loved ones in homes in which they were seeking shelter from the Israeli ground forces. I had to have the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose family were killed. One family, over 21 members, killed by Israeli mortars. So, it was a very difficult investigation, which will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

2. Richard Goldstone in the famous Washington Post Op-Ed of April 2011, “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report…”

“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document… For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.”