8:27PM
Cole on Friedman
Issandr El Amrani
Juan Cole has an important if much too polite post on why Thomas Friedman is a fucking moron. Yes, I know, not exactly stop-the-presses kind of news, but still important.
Reader Comments (18)
I have not yet read the piece by Cole, but I would like to say that I have not been able to stomach Tommy Friedman for a long time. He strikes me as a hypocritical situational moralist and for all his false pretensions to the contrary, I don't think he knows much about the middle east.
Looking at Cole's sources...I'm not so sure about how wrong Friedman is.
Or how intellectually honest Cole is.
I have to admit I did like Beirut to Jerusalem. Just to read someone coming at a well-discussed topic from a different angle is interesting in itself. For most people writing about the whole Pal-Isr "thing", it's a simple issue of moral outrage against the practices of the Israeli state. But for Friedman it was a love affair that turned sour and now seems to have been somewhat rekindled. You don't have to agree with him, but interesting anyway.
I think this was an unfair attack. Friedman is aiming at a particular audience and trying to convince them that the report was worth a look. Many of them would have dismissed it as just another attempt to blame America and Israel for all of the Arab world's problems.
See his last para:
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But the important thing about this report is that political reform is now being put on the Arab agenda by Arabs. Yes, it's scathing about the Western and Israeli roles in retarding Arab democratization, but it's equally scathing about what Arabs have done to themselves and how they must change - people don't change when you tell them they should, but when they tell themselves they must. Read this report and you'll also understand why part of every Arab hates the U.S. invasion of Iraq - and why another part is praying that it succeeds.
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Praktike, why don't you stop trying to find good in Friedman. Once in a while, by mistake, he says something right. He uses stupid over the top metaphors, he mentions the "Arab Street" so often it makes me physically ill, he swings back and forth in what he himself is calling for, and he stopped being an objective observer of the Middle East apparently right after the ink dried on "From Beirut to Jerusalem." I have lost friendships with Americans who insist on deciphering his screeds on the Middle East every time he pens them and then sending them to me like he can explain to me the place I live in from his too big office in NY. Why do Americans keep trying so hard to give this horrible writer who has no new ideas and who basically writes word salad, the benefit of the doubt? Will you knock it off? Write your own articles, you are an honest student of the region, and quit trying to find anythign valuable in his.
Come on Y'all....you know that the world is flat - that is reportedly what Tom told his wife after a trip to India in the excerpted piece published in the NYTmagazine last week (from his latest book). The book has the subtitle "A brief history of the 21st century" - Well, its only been 5 years.....
My particular Friedman favorite faithfully remains in a piece from 2000 where he is on the train from Cairo to Alex. He is complaining about all the ringing mobile phones as he looks out the window at the agriculture land. He then realizes Egypt's problem.....Inside the train, it is 2000 AD and outside it is 2000 BC. Very sophisticated stuff, my friends.
And don't even get me started on Hama Rules, which he recently republished to describe the Syrian-Lebanese issue. As if it was not reductionist and boldly misrepresentative the first time.
Thank the forces of the world that do at least give us Dowd Krugman on the NYT as regular columnists.
Oh God Josh, your favorites are the ones that made me spit nails and lose friends! I'll never forget that condescending piece of [expletive deleted] regarding Egypt when he visited here and thought the view from the train was too old fashioned and sneered at elevator operators for saying the Basmalah when getting on the elevator which he interpreted as if they thought God was operating it and didn't understand electricity. I could not believe it was the same guy who had lived in Lebanon so many years. I think there is something wrong with his head. And Hama Rules made me cry I was so enraged.
"Why do Americans keep trying so hard to give this horrible writer who has no new ideas and who basically writes word salad, the benefit of the doubt? Will you knock it off? Write your own articles, you are an honest student of the region, and quit trying to find anythign valuable in his."
Hmmm. He is indeed an atrocious writer and one who is entirely too glib about the world, globalization, etc. He bothers me a lot of the time, too, especially when he discovers a new version of THE ANSWER every week. I'm sure "The World is Flat" would induce me to break things. But he was the only American op/ed columnist that I'm aware of who actually seems to have paid attention to the UNDP reports, and he did report on US attempts to squash it. Also, keep in mind that he was the journo who won a Pulitzer from reporting on Sabra & Shatila. So he's not altogether bad. Just dangerously reductionist at times. I'm sure my feelings about him will change once I've spent more time in Cairo, though.
Praktike, you're setting the bar way too low here. There is lots of thoughtful commentary on the UNDP report on Internet sites like this one - never mind that idiots work for the NYT. Also I really think you will find more US based print sources on it if you look harder; perhaps, for example, the Christian Science Monitor. There are also places like the UK Guardian which I bet dealt with the issue. I personally have not had time to read it yet but if you want Americans to know about it, the other option is for you to write articles and send them to newspapers yourself. Rather than recommending Friedman to ANYONE. Because he is wrong more than half the time, and the fact that once in a while he says something random that ends up being correct is not enough to make him worth while.
Fair enough Prak - he is the only American columnists who knows what the AHDR is and he publish that the report was being slapped around by Shrub and the Admin - I will give him that. Does one good deed excuse the rest though?
All his wavering on the war against Iraq and its aftermath where he is basically saying things look good is complete rubbish.
That is in addition to the reductionist comments previously mentioned.
Aha. Well, I suppose you're right that *I* don't need to be promoting Friedman in lieu of other sources, but he does have a big platform compared to the (excellent) CS Monitor and the (less excellent IMHO) Grauniad.
To get away from all the very well intentioned intellectual dissection of Friedman's work, reach and ability to hit the right note on occasion (the comment about many monkeys on many typewriters, over many years comes to mind). Isn't the problem that Friedman loves himself something chronic? That's what it really is, isn't it? He's not that great really but he thinks his musings should be written up as religious texts.
Yes, Friedman is a bit of a hack (though that must come of dividing your thoughts into 700-word chunks twice a week), but you can hardly describe Juan Cole as a disinterested critic.
As a lifetime member of the guild of middle east experts, Cole is obliged to demonstrate that the work of his corporate group is relevant and interesting. This instinctive reaction is a sign of weakness. Surely part of the whole Middle East studies problem that Friedman and Cole disagree about is that there is an obsession with always being relevant. Maxine Rodinson describes this, in an interview printed in MERIP last year, as 'spectacle'. It gets in the way of serious scholarship, and of work that is of genuine worth.
My favourite Friedman story (at the same event in Cairo in 2000) is when he told the audience that in pursuit of globalisation they "should shoot their wounded".
"Surely part of the whole Middle East studies problem that Friedman and Cole disagree about is that there is an obsession with always being relevant."
Call me crazy if you will, but there is no Middle East studies "problem". Never has been, never will be I imagine. The only reason people seem to think one exists is because like so much else in the US these days a bunch of partisan warriors decided they wanted another arena to do battle in. Congratulations to them I guess, they have succeeded once again not by proving a point, but simply by shifting the framework for the argument so that sensible people are suddenly forced to defend something that should require no defense. It's not about truth, it's about who can get the other guy to look stupid in front of the crowd by screaming the loudest.
By the way, a recent issue of the Economist has a scathing article about Friedman that explains that "the earth is flat" epiphany.
http://economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3809512
My favorite Friedman story was told to me recently by a senior journalist at one of America's most prestigious papers. I'm sure he'd rather stay anonymous.
The story goes like this: This journalist and a bunch of others were having lunch at a top DC restaurant (The Bombay ClubI think) where the powerful and influential rub shoulders. William Safire was in one corner, Madeleine Albright in another, in other words the room was full what ABC's The Note likes to call "The Gang of 500" -- i.e. the 500 political operators and opinion-makers who run America.
The journalists were having a working lunch with Robert Zoellick when he was still USTR and had just come back from an important trade agreement involving Israel, quite possibly December's QIZ agreement .
Thomas Friedman walks in and spots Zoellick. He walks over and says "Hi Bob, how's it going."
Zoellick responds, jokingly, "Still working for Middle East peace, Tom." or something like that. He was obviously referring to himself and his recent trip.
But that's not how Friedman interpreted it. He nodded his head pensively, and said "I'm trying my best, Bob" and walked off, leaving a table of stunned journalists behind him. He thought Zoellick was talking about him.
Liam, above, is right: the thing with Friedman is that the narcissist long ago overshadowed the talented journalist. In French there is a literary witticism about the writer Victor Hugo, who was all too conscious over towering presence over the nineteenth century: "Victor Hugo, ce fou qui se prend pour Victor Hugo" -- "Victor Hugo, that madman who thinks he's Victor Hugo." It's the same, to a much lesser extent, with Friedman: he is a madman who believes he is Thomas Friedman -- his own idealized version of Thomas Friedman as the world's conscience, the man with the answers to the Middle East's problems if only they would listen to him. No wonder the Saudis chose to go to him when Crown Prince Abdullah launched his initiative, he's crazy enough to think he can bring it to the table and solve problems in one fell swoop. The problem is people take him quite seriously; in Egypt for instance when he wrote his "Dear Hosni" letters a lot of the sycophantic press was outraged and interpreted it as a reflection of US policy.
Wahh, what would we do without those oh-so-democratic "Israelis" and "Americans"! The world would indeed be such a dark, depressing, oppressed place without them!
OK, Issandr, that's pretty damned funny. He got completely used by the Saudis, too.
Seems that everyone has a 'favorite Friedman story'. You gotta give it to him, he's a damn good story teller.