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December 17, 2004
Let Me Condescend to You, My Dear Arab Friends
Here's Thomas Friedman, lamenting how the Bush administration is apparently holding up the third "Arab Human Development Report":
So I eagerly awaited the third Arab Human Development Report, due in October. ... I waited. And I waited. But nothing.Then I started to hear disturbing things - that the Bush team saw a draft of the Arab governance report and objected to the prologue, because it was brutally critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation. This prologue constitutes some 10 percent of the report. While heartfelt, it's there to give political cover to the Arab authors for their clear-eyed critique of Arab governance, which is the other 90 percent of the report. [emphasis mine]
Everything else aside, don't you love this kind of Condescension Special to Those Who Bravely Carry the White Man's Burden that Friedman seems to practice with the same ease as breathing. It's not possible that a bunch of Arab intellectuals and activists really, really wanted to register their "brutal criticisms" of Israel's settler colonial occupation and the U.S.-led war on Iraq. It's just cover.
And to make sure that the depth of the insult is not missed by anyone, he deigns to add that the criticisms were "heartfelt".
Posted by zeynep at December 17, 2004 12:07 AM
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Comments
Even though Friedman is a fuckwit, he is not such a big fuckwit as Harrison Ford and the shits at Universal Pictures for this:
Indiana Jones leads Hollywood version of battle for Falluja
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1375731,00.html
Perhaps the Nazis should have made a film about how the wonderful Waffen-SS heroically put down the terrorists in the Warsaw Ghetto to save Poland for democracy!
Posted by: blowback at December 17, 2004 07:19 AM
I caught that too, but was glad (my standards for Friedman are so low) that he at least admitted the criticisms were heartfelt. An interesting question I have is why we virtually never see these Arab intellectuals writing opinion pieces for the NYT. Why do we have to have things filtered through Friedman? From his own words these guys aren't sellouts--they have harsh things to say both about their own societies and about ours. So why do we need to be shielded from what they have to say for themselves?
Rhetorical questions, of course. The whole point is for the NYT to control who gets to interpret the Arab world. Certainly from their standpoint most Arabs can't be trusted with this task.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at December 17, 2004 11:09 AM
Friedman is despicable.
Want to see racism in action? Watch his hour long special on Israel/Palestine.
He interviews three Israelis, or groups of Israelis, and three Palestinians, or groups of Palestinians.
Note: The whole thing is being filmed.
While any Israeli is talking he is listening.
While any Palestinian is talking, he is typing. They are filming it, but he has to take notes. He doesn't look at them.
There's more, thank god for Discovery/NY Times channel, which airs propaganda like this 24 hours a day, channel 114(I think) for Time Warner/Manhattan.
Friedman is a fuckwit racist.
Sorry, I hate him a lot.
Posted by: Josh Narins at December 24, 2004 03:08 PM