Friedman has written 19 opinion pieces in the New York Times since June, but only two about the Mideast, where he made his reputation, and then ruined it by enthusiastically supporting Iraq war. So he has avoided the pressing issues of Israel’s annexation and Trump/Pompeo’s threats to goad Iran into a conflict in the middle of the presidential race.
The New York Times is downplaying the Trump administration’s efforts to provoke conflict with Iran — and when it does report on the danger it relies on the Israel lobby for spin.
An award-winning breathless New York Times podcast about Islamic Jihadism that was downloaded millions of times in 2018 turns out to have been based on a fraudulent liar — but so far the paper and its reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, have declined to fully acknowledge their error.
Trump’s Bahrain-Israel pact is a power politics move and has been embraced by Israel lobby groups, Democratic reps, and the NYT, all of which bash Palestinians. But in fact it only advances the one-state struggle for democracy inside Israel and Palestine.
Russiagate is an excuse to ramp up a new Cold War. That’s why so many national security types love it. Antiwar types should see this as an internecine fight between different factions of warmongers, a jingoistic and xenophobic way to blame our country’s pathetic political culture on evil foreigners. McCarthyism 2.0 The more demented liberals online blame every criticism of the Democrats on Putin.
Rightwing Israeli Shmuel Rosner once again justifies slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the New York Times, in a column praising Trump and calling Biden a Zionist who “understands the need to use force.”
The danger that Benjamin Netanyahu will provoke Donald Trump into attacking Iran is not over. In fact, the risk of conflict just increased.
Change is in the air and the Israel lobby can no longer stamp it out by using its gatekeepers to censor and malign opposing voices. This is the real significance of Bari Weiss’s resignation from the New York Times.
Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs writer with the largest potential influence on earth, has taken his intellectual cowardice to a new level.