{"id":39899,"date":"2012-01-18T11:52:36","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T19:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=39899"},"modified":"2012-01-18T11:52:36","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T19:52:36","slug":"tom-friedman-vs-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=39899","title":{"rendered":"Tom Friedman Vs Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Maoz writes<\/a>: Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, proved once again last week that despite his non-stop insistence that he has Israel\u2019s best interests at heart, he relishes nothing more than slinging mud at Israel and its most vocal American supporters.<\/p>\n

By writing that the numerous standing ovations showered on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu by members of Congress last spring were \u201cbought and paid for by the Israel lobby,\u201d Friedman employed a canard dear to the hardest of hard-core critics of Israel, a good number of whom are obsessed with conspiracy theories regarding the alleged stranglehold of pro-Israel forces on the machinery of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

As the New York Post\u2019s Michael Goodwin wrote, Friedman \u201coffers no support or example, as though the Jews-equal-money connection is so obvious it doesn\u2019t require evidence. Such paranoid assertions are routine in crackpot circles, but the appearance in the Times under Friedman\u2019s byline is shocking and will offer aid and comfort to enemies of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what are we to expect of a man who in the past has written of a U.S. president being held \u201cunder house arrest\u201d in the White House by an Israeli prime minister; likened Israeli leaders to drunk drivers; characterized the late Menachem Begin\u2019s pride in things Jewish as Begin\u2019s \u201cpornography\u201d and, in a fit of pique over what he considered the overemphasis of Holocaust remembrance in Israeli public life, described the country as \u201cYad Vashem with an air force\u201d?<\/p>\n

Friedman\u2019s tiresome refrain is that his disdain is reserved for specific Israeli leaders (generally those on the right) and policies. But Friedman was already an outspoken critic of Israel back in the mid-1970s, before the country elected its first Likud prime minister.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time Friedman graduated from Brandeis University in 1975,\u201d wrote historian Jerold S. Auerbach, he was already expressing sympathy with the Palestinian national cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Auerbach (a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press) went into some detail about Friedman\u2019s college-era activism in a 1990 letter to Commentary magazine:<\/p>\n

During his final year at Brandeis, after returning from a summer of study in Cairo, Friedman belonged to the steering committee of a self-styled \u201cMiddle East Peace Group.\u201d It vigorously opposed the mounting storm of protest among American Jews (to be expressed in a \u201cRally Against Terror\u201d) over Yasir Arafat\u2019s impending appearance before the United Nations General Assembly. In November 1974, on the day before Arafat\u2019s infamous declaration that Zionism is racism, delivered while brandishing a pistol on his hip, the Peace Group published a statement in the Brandeis Justice. Co-signed by Friedman, it called for Israel to negotiate with \u201call factions of the Palestinians, including the PLO\u201d and stated that the issue of \u201cPalestinian self determination,\u201d a standard euphemism for a Palestinian state, was \u201cone of the central issues blocking peace in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement acknowledged repeated acts of PLO terror against Jews, but claimed they were \u201cclearly not representative of the diverse elements of the Palestinian people,\u201d though the only evidence of such diversity presented was of those even more committed to terrorism than the PLO itself. It also asserted that \u201cinternational condemnation of terrorist activities for which the PLO is responsible can have little effect. . . .\u201d The group joined Breira, already notorious for its endorsement of Palestinian goals and for the blame it placed on the United States and Israel for Middle East instability, in urging \u201ca more meaningful and constructive approach\u201d than protesting against Arafat and the PLO.<\/p>\n

Again, this was a time when the liberal-left Labor Alignment was still firmly in power in Israel and years before any Palestinian leader was prepared to make even the most perfunctory of gestures at denouncing terrorism and proclaiming readiness to negotiate with Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu was a 25-year-old college student in the U.S. What accounted for Friedman\u2019s issues with Israel then?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Maoz writes: Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, proved once again last week that despite his non-stop insistence that he has Israel\u2019s best interests at heart, he relishes nothing more than slinging mud at Israel and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[28750,30984,28751,28749,28752,24599],"class_list":["post-39899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jason-maoz","tag-affairs-columnist","tag-brandeis-university","tag-fit-of-pique","tag-holocaust-remembrance","tag-israel-forces","tag-prime-minister-netanyahu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}