The media routinely state that Hamas wants to eradicate Israel. Some of the mystery about Hamas’s goals is surely because the organization is treated as a pariah. U.S. diplomats are prohibited from talking to it openly, the U.S. government calls it a terrorist organization, and the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. media outlets rarely if ever try to interview its leaders or listen to its supporters.

The New York Times’s Mideast expert Thomas Friedman blames the Palestinian uprising on Tik-Tok vidoes rather than on the racist landgrabs by Israel that Palestinians have resisted for decades and that are at the heart of the Human Rights Watch report that the New York Times is determined to flush down the memory hole.

The dominant message on US cables is that Iran has pursued a nuclear weapon, thereby justifying the Israeli assassination. This is dishonest. And when Tom Friedman rationalized Israeli assassination by saying that Iran is the regional aggressor, he was promptly eviscerated by commenters in his own paper.

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.

Tom Friedman behaved exactly like the Israel lobby’s flagship organization, AIPAC, which similarly issued no warnings against annexation, but jumped immediately to endorse the UAE-Israel agreement.

Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs writer with the largest potential influence on earth, has taken his intellectual cowardice to a new level.

Why is the New York Times missing in action on the burning issue of annexation? Undoubtedly because there is no way to twist annexation in a pro-Israel direction.

Liberal Zionists say Trump is bending over backwards for Israel to win evangelical voters in swing states. This is not true, as his recent rallies in MI and PA demonstrate– scarcely a mention of Israel. He saves his Israel pandering for a Jewish audience, with donor Sheldon Adelson present.

Israel would have reached a deal with the Palestinians and allowed a Palestinian state years ago if it did not have blind American support to go on taking more and more Palestinian land. The Israel lobby, which has prevented criticism in both parties in the U.S., is the root cause of the conflict, and the lobby’s role as Israel’s supporter in western capitals is a fundamental principle of Zionism.

By threatening Iran with war, Donald Trump is proving to be the “perfect little puppet,” as he once put it of his largest donor, Sheldon Adelson, who is close to Netanyahu and once called on Obama to nuke Iran. Too bad the media can’t talk about it.