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September 17, 2005

Friedman's follies

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Thomas Friedman compares some Israelis to fascists. Hmm...isn't this just one smidgen away semantically from calling them ...Nazis?

Clever, this journalist may be. This type of comparison got a lot of Democratic politicians (and Republican Senator Santorum) in trouble.  He does not once mention Islamic or Palestinian extremism as a source of the problems besetting the region and relies on a far—left Israel—bashing academic and writer (Ari Shavit) for support.

Ed Lasky  7 13 05

Richard Baehr adds:

In his final sentence, Friedman mentions that Muslims need to confront  their equivalent of settlers: suicide bombers and terrorists. And of course, he does not distingush between extremist (fascist) settlers, and those who are merely suburbanites lured to settlements by cheap housing and favorable loans. He slips between using settlers and extremist settlers from one sentence to the next, deliberately of course.

As for his making a huge fuss over "Muhammed is a Pig," a lot worse than that is broadcast by official Palestinian media and Arab government media routinely. The writers of  Muhammed is a Pig might just be juveniles or jerks, rather than as Friedman sees them— the advance guard of a settler movement trying to create war between Jews and Arabs so as as to preserve the settlements.