A Friedman Conundrum

Tom Friedman’s commentary on Israel and Gaza has been pretty good (not too bad? better than his usual commentary?) lately, according to what I see on social media. People attribute this to the fact that Israel and Gaza were Friedman’s beat when he was reporting.

I am not following events in Israel and Gaza in detail. I’m not expert in the area, although I know a few things that can be applicable. It seems to me that there has to be some thinking about what comes after the current war.

Friedman interviewed Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Davos. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also spoke and was interviewed by Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. I thought that Blinken offered a couple of things that were worth noting. The two administration officials were well coordinated in their message, but Blinken was more forthcoming.

Friedman’s January 31 column outlined what he calls a “Biden Doctrine” developing on the Middle East. I thought it might be useful to pull Blinken quotes under the three tracks Friedman outlined.

I was writing that post when horrified comments started appearing on Bluesky about something Friedman wrote. It seems not to be available as a column, but rather as an entry in the Times’s opinion blog. I am pretty sure I found it on his Times page, but I could be wrong.  His bio on that page says that his columns appear on Sunday and Wednesday, but there seems to be no column for yesterday.

I won’t quote from it, but will say that he compares countries and individuals in the Middle East to insects and animals. This seems like the kind of thing one should avoid, given its use by dictators to dehumanize people they want to kill. Friedman’s language and choice of metaphors are racist and implicitly genocidal.

So I stopped working on my post. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend and am almost back to the thought that what Blinken had to say was important enough, and Friedman summarizes it succinctly enough, that I want to work through what Blinken and Sullivan said via Friedman’s summary.

What does the LGM commentariat have to say about my writing such a post? I have a strong desire never to write about Friedman again, but the administration may have given him a very early trial balloon.

In any case, let’s use this thread for excoriating Friedman so that we can concentrate on the plan if/when I write that post.