Your average Thomas Friedman column is foolish, incomprehensible, and morally obtuse, but this is truly reprehensible:
That concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with these other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred — not the advice of friends.Israel is holding ONE AND A HALF MILLION HUMAN BEINGS IN CAPTIVITY. It has imprisoned them in a concentration camp. It is one of the surpassing moral outrages of our era, an act of criminal viciousness and vindictive, retributive collective punishment that ought to shock the conscience of any human being.
The acts that Friedman finds so much more worthy of hand-waving denunciation, while regrettable and worthy of condemnation, pale in comparison. I mean, gunmen storming a summer camp are a very bad thing, but this pales beside Israel's offenses. Forget Gaza. Israel killed more people by a whole order of magnitude in its ridiculous 2006 Lebanon war than in all of Friedman's examples combined.
30 comments:
i ran the numbers on that Lebanon thing a while back:
http://www.stumplane.us/blog/2006/08/10/lebanon-cold-calculus/
Yeah, but in Tommy's world killing is OK is if it's being done by uniformed men taking orders from a government that he approves of, no matter the volume.
You know, forget what you quoted. What the fuck is this about?
I once even argued that if the European Union wouldn’t admit Turkey, we should invite Turkey to join Nafta.
Well, okay... I think that if Nafta won't admit Turkey, she should join my Tuesday night hearts club.
Eight-year-olds, Dude.
Besides, the US is responsible for enabling Israel's atrocities, unlike in TF's preferred examples. Thus we should take a special interest even if the human suffering quotient did happen to be less.
Yeah, well how many Palestinian Nobel prize winners has Gaza produced in the last few decades, huh?
/Inky
Anon @ 12:16---
I'm guessing a duly proportional number, had the tens of billions in Western aid over the years actually reached the intended Palestinian recipients, instead of being diverted into the coffers of the corrupt Egyptian stooge Arafat, or now to weaponry, transport, and security by the corrupt, end-Israel Palestinian leadership.
Said leadership, just like Israel's Muslim neighbors, don't actually give a tinker's damn about the average Palestinian's woeful lot except to exploit it as a rallying cry against the hated Joos, for which cause the Palestinians must remain in convenient nonage and misery. Otherwise these weasels would have made a decent utilitarian peace on any number of apt occasions, with easy recourse to international public relations battles and Western mod-prog enablers as necessary.
Said leadership, just like Israel's Muslim neighbors, don't actually give a tinker's damn about the average Palestinian's woeful lot except to exploit it as a rallying cry against the hated Joos, for which cause the Palestinians must remain in convenient nonage and misery.
Uh, you really don't know much about the history of Hamas do you.
Anon @ 1:35---
Admittedly a naif here, but does the "history" of Hamas include the priorities and goals of its leaders? If so, it's Destroy Israel first, Palestinian people second.
Let's all just stipulate that if Hamas does, uh, "destroy Isreal," it will have to be categorized as a parricide.
Patricide, shurely.
And, and...all this after double-stealing the prisoners' land.
Guhdamn, Inky actually took the bait. Tee hee.
I meant "Destroy Israel" (and her Joos), not Canaan, or Philistia! And Jerusalem's where the Prophet landed during his Dream Journey, so the City of the Dome merits preservation just like the Holy Meteorite.
Thomas Friedman is a dangerous, spineless man.
This isn't your average stupidity, like inkberrow's. This is willful refusal to say the truth. And whatever we say wont make any difference, he will keep churning out his self righteous propaganda, and the great 'newspaper' NYT, will always have space for him.
Makes me sick, and really really mad. :S
I like how Frieds' claims he's a friend of Turkey and Israel. The question is does Turkey feel the same?
People, seriously... stop sleeping on the Nafta thing.
how can a person be friend of a whole fucking country?
You remind me of me in 12th grade at New Lincoln School in NYC (the "progressive" spin-off from Columbia's lab school - Horace Mann was the "traditional" spin-off)
Being a progressive school and it being 1964, we had a smoking lounge where we'd play bridge at lunch. But of course, lunch stretched into 5th period this and 6th period that, so one day the principal calls me and my friends in and tells us we've got to get some self-discipline and attend classes.
I told her that if the school's classes were interesting enough to beat-out bridge, we'd be there with bell's on.
See what I mean? You haven't got over your surprise, anger, and disgust at finding out how badly the world is designed to work ...
"how can a person be friend of a whole fucking country?"
Why, personally, I've befriended as many as six legal fictions before breakfast.
Any article I read, AP or otherwise, includes the standalone paragraph pointing out, "Israel says its commandos fired in self-defense." The main variance of this thought from, "Somalia says its pirates fired in self-defence" is that in the latter case the idea of pirates firing in self-defense when the master of the ship on the high seas inexplicably fails to go with the game plan does not also give you their entire national narrative A to Z.
Only assholes use "There are worse things out there, you have no right to complain about anything until you've complained about those."
A while back I was working and a piece of wood fell over and landed on my head. I swore, because it was painful, and the people around me asked if I was okay.
What's notable is that not one of them said "Hey, what the hell are you complaining about? Do you know how many people out there wish their biggest problem was getting hit in the head with a board?"
Evil does not somehow become acceptable because something worse happened somewhere else.
So I kind of think you're granting too much to Friedman, Mr. IOZ; Friedman is arguing that we can't arrest a man for killing his wife and kids if there are serial killers running around. It's a bullshit logic only employed by people who are trying to wriggle out of some deserved punishment.
The magnitude of Isreal's crimes has nothing to do with what other countries are doing.
Christopher... xoxo
I was anon 1:35... for some reason, I can't post as 'lucid' anymore and sometimes under my 'kurt' google id... whatev
While all of that was in the forefront of my mind, that fact that Hamas actually gained power, precisely because it was developed as a humanitarian party as opposed to a nationalist party most completely obliterates any ramblings by the self proclaimed 'naif'. Hamas gained power because it actually did community organizing, fed the poor, etc., etc. - I think why it lost power can only be understood within the context of the severe right swing in Israeli politics [if one can say that] post Rabin.
And in none of the above am forgiving the west for giving a green light for Ben Gurion genocide from 1930's on.
When I was in grad school, I was the research assistant for Yirmiyahu Yovel. I edited both of his books from the early 2000's and did a lot of the preliminary research on his recent book on the Marranos.
During the time I worked with him, he was tirelessly seeking the type of peace - one or two state - that the majority of Israeli citizens had been seeking up to that point. Their government differed. The US government differed. The settlers - given free homes and stipends, differed.
And then the last 10 years happened... the takeover of east Jerusalem by a war criminal that should be smooching Kissinger in prison. The ghettoization of all land that still has Palestinians on it... the bulldozering of human rights activists... the outright shooting of human rights activists on live television...
fuck me...
If I meet someone that can excuse the Israeli genocide, we really don't have anything to talk about. It's kind of like being against abortion for me. Or for the 'trail of tears'.
It's certainly an interesting variant of the Tu Quoque Fallacy: "You fail to condemn A in the manner you condemn B therefore your condemnation of B is invalid" enhanced to "You fail to condemn A in the manner you condemn B therefore you are a jew-hater."
Hamas gained power primarily because they aren't collaborators like Fath, yo. It doesn't mean that the majority of Palestinians identify with them, nor should it excuse anything.
It should also be noted that Mossad and Shin-Bet funded and supported Hamas as a counter force to secular Leftist Palestinian resitance groups. Now they are all the usual suspects favorite bugaboo. Reading some of the comments in the Israeli press almost made my head explode. For example Flotilla=Hamas=Hizbullah=Iran=Al-Queada=Israel in mortal danger from boats bearing milk powder and crayons.
No doubt Friedman has his limits, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What he's done here is a significant first step toward achieving a worthy goal I think we can all agree on: getting Turkey to at long last sign the Treaty of Tordesillas.
It's time to move past the same tired debates between Spain and Portugal, between meridians and lines of latitude. Because this issue is too important to let progress languish while we fight these same battles over and over again.
You probably already read this Larison bit, but he calls out Friedman for vacillating on how much he loves Turkey in the course of a month.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/06/02/the-u-s-and-turkey/
(And if Turkey joins NAFTA, I insist that Taiwan join the OAS)
His red herrings are full of the moral condemnation that his concern for civilians suffering in Gaza or the, uh, the "'humanitarian' activists", lacks. I am unsure whether it would be more appropriate in this regrettable circumstance to wag my finger, or to wring my hands.
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