Comments on: Mideast Media Sampler 09/09/2013 https://www.yourish.com/2013/09/09/18552 Cutting straight to the point Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:10:53 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.2 By: Michael Lonie https://www.yourish.com/2013/09/09/18552/comment-page-1#comment-50499 Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:10:53 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/?p=18552#comment-50499 You quote Friedman writing:
“The center exists in these countries, but it is weak and unorganized. It’s because these are pluralistic societies — mixtures of tribes and religious sects, namely Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druze and Turkmen — but they lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism. That is, tolerance, cooperation and compromise.”

Israel practices these virtues, but that cuts no ice with Friedman. He makes constant, vitriolic attacks on that country anyway.

I might also note that among the pluralism of religions and ethnicities in those Arab societies, there is one group that is conspicuously absent: Jews. They used to inhabit all of them. Now I wonder, where did they go and why? Do you think Thomas Friedman, that self-proclaimed expert on the Middle East, knows or cares?

As for “Israel apartheid,” Friedman really ought to know that it is a vicious lie made up by the old USSR’s propagandists and snatched at by their Arab clients to further the war against the West and the West’s outpost in partibus infidelum, Israel. For him to repeat it is evidence of his bad faith, if not worse.

]]>