Up until the moment I discovered otherwise, I was considering Thomas Friedman who is a columnist for the New York Times to be just a humor journalist who is adept at internalizing the Israeli fantasies and turning them into comical situations to entertain the American public and confuse those who work inside the beltway. But then something happened that said to me this guy can be dangerous besides being funny.
It happened one day when Friedman was on the Jim Lehrer News Hour or maybe on the Charlie Rose show and related the following story. He said he was standing with diplomats from various Arab countries at the airport of some Arab Gulf State where they had just held a municipal election. A diplomat whose country never held such election turned to Friedman and asked: Can this happen in my country too?
I yelled c’mon kid, only someone too far gone would believe that an Arab diplomat would consider a foreigner, let alone an American Jew to be such an expert on his country as to ask him a question like this in front of other diplomats. And from that day on, I have regarded Thomas Friedman to be not only a humoristic journalist but a dangerous character as well. Dangerous to America, that is.
Friedman has done it again but not as daringly this time. In a column published by the New York Times on June 11, 2008 titled:”Obama on the Nile” he said he was sitting in Cairo with a number of Egyptians at which time the question was asked on behalf of someone’s child in a general sort of way if a Christian had a chance at being elected in Egypt the same way that Obama, a man of Color, may be elected in America.
Friedman then went on to ramble something about a Shiite becoming the leader of Saudi Arabia? A Bahai president of Iran? It is not clear from the writing who was supposed to have asked these additional questions. Were they the people sitting with Friedman, the son of one of them or Friedman himself? No one cares anyway because it matters no longer what this man concocts on the spur of the moment to sound interesting or funny. He robbed someone of the expression the World is flat, was forced to admit his thievery and the World now knows of his pathology; and no one gives a hoot except maybe Charlie Rose who is still infatuated with him.
Had Friedman said in his column he was the one to ask those questions and had he honestly reported what the responses were - if indeed that conversation took place at all - he would have done the American public and those in the beltway a great service. I can imagine what the responses were - if there were any - but I cannot imagine under any circumstance that an Egyptian would ask this sort of questions especially in the presence of a foreigner, an American Jew at that.
Still, there is an attempt at injecting comical relief in the Friedman column in that he begins it by assuring the reader he cannot tell a lie. All comedians say this before uttering something outrageous, don’t they? Further down the column, he relates a story told to him by Michael Slackman who has been reporting from Cairo for the past little while. In fact, Slackman has his own piece published on the same day under the title: “Don’t Leave Home Without a Cultural Compass”
In that piece, Slackman says this: “The United States’ relations with Egypt are strained. From the man on the street to the president, rightly or wrongly, Egyptians are feeling disrespected by Washington.” Well, Slackman must have left home without his cultural compass on that day because he did not realize that the Egyptians do not give a hoot as to who respects them or disrespects them. These people are so adapted at returning disrespect for disrespect; they do it on the basis not of an ounce for an ounce but on the basis of a ton of dripping contempt for an ounce of disrespect. Don’t leave home without this piece of knowledge, Mike.
Taking after Rodney Dangerfield’s: “I don’t get no respect,” it seems that every time Jewish journalists write in a print publication or speak through the electronic media, they relate that Russia feels disrespected by Washington, China feels disrespected by Washington, Egypt feels disrespected by Washington, and God knows who else feels disrespected by Washington.
This is getting too repetitive, too sick, too transparent, too much of a Yiddish flavored fantasy and it is getting too tiresome. Please fellows, enough of this nonsense; stop telling us who else feels they don’t get no respect from Washington. Rodney is dead; get over it and honor his memory in some other fashion.
And this is not the only repetitively sickening habit I detect which bears the signature and fingerprint of a Talmudic upbringing. There is also the viewing of international relations through the prism of the angst you normally find in a high school yard. This is because all international relations are boiled down to the questions of who loves America, who hates America and by how much they love or hate America.
Take it from me, New York Times, the people of Iran love the politics of your country no more than their leaders do. Try to bomb them and they will no more pelt you with flowers or shower you with kisses than the Iraqis did. Stop perpetuating this sick fantasy right now if you don’t want to slide into the abyss and get mired in another disastrous war. You cannot print this sort of trash, incite your idiotic leaders to start a war then oppose it when it goes bad. Ending this insane cycle is in your hand because you are the ones that start it.
And if you ask why it is that guys like Friedman and Slackman are dangerous, you get the answer from the following 3 paragraphs which are a passage from the Slackman piece:
[In Egypt, the recently departed United States ambassador, Francis Ricciardone, was well regarded by Egyptians on the street and in high office because he spoke the way they did — with effusive praise for his hosts. But this got him in trouble at home.]
[In February 2007, the ambassador was interviewed on Egyptian television and displayed his characteristic guest-in-the-house behavior. “Egypt today is very different from Egypt during the 1980s, both economically and politically,” he said at a time when it was clear that the government was backpedaling on political reforms. “There is more freedom and there are more intense, aggressive discussions.”]
[He was then blasted back in the United States for sounding like an apologist for the government. His term ended abruptly at the three-year mark. He left Egypt last month.]
If the insinuation here is to the effect that the ambassador’s term was ended because someone in Washington felt he should have insulted his hosts rather than treat them with “respect,” you begin to understand why the whole World, not only the Arabs, have come to believe that Washington does not speak English anymore but speaks in the most insulting of all the languages: that demonic concoction called the Yiddish.
They speak it in the Congress, the White House, the State Department, Guantanamo and they spoke it at Abu Ghraib. America is no longer America; it is becoming more Yiddish by the day. Be advised ye who follow history that America has become the setting, and Uncle Sam has become the alter ego of every riff raff speech writer, advisor, journalist and pundit who is writing the Judaic horror fantasy by which a once great nation is being turned into a sick joke that is losing its comical edge.
And since no one in the World is shy about responding to disrespect with an equal or greater amount of disrespect, you will understand why there are so many who delight in rubbing America’s nose in the mud. When this happens, don’t blame it on bad behavior, blame it on those who have created the climate which prompts the beltway dwellers to behave like jackasses and beg to be treated like jackasses.
Maybe what America needs now to save it from the pool of mud in which it is swimming is a new crop of non-Jewish journalists and pundits who will project a better picture of the country to the World and project a more mature picture of the World to the American people, especially those in the beltway who have no better method to make decisions than to base them on the accounts of the media.
And the New York Times would be a good place to start the clean-up.