Soccer Dad

Discovering political civility

After ignoring eight years of political mudslinging directed at President Bush, Thomas Friedman has discovered the virtue of political civility. If Friedman every wrote a column condemning the likes of Michael Moore or Cindy Sheehan - or even his co-columnist Paul Krugman - I don't recall it. I'm sure I didn't see any columns of him criticizing Air America, Al Franken or those "Re-defeat Bush" bumper stickers. No, for eight years, Thomas Friedman was not bothered by the lack of political civility because he was on the side of the President's critics, detractors and mockers.

But now he fears for President Obama's life. How does he know? Because he lived through it once before. In today's execrable column "Where did 'we' go?" he explains:

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then -- a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish settler as a license to kill Rabin -- he must have heard, "God will be on your side" -- and so he did.

There is so much wrong with these paragraphs, it's hard to know where to begin. For all the talk of harsh rhetoric coming from the Israeli right in 1995, he doesn't recall that the rhetoric coming from the government against the right was just as harsh. Jeff Jacoby noted:

Only by the barest majority -- 61-59 -- did parliament vote last month to ratify the accord with the PLO. Two weeks earlier, a national poll found that 56 percent of Israelis rated the peace process "bad" or "very bad." The world applauded Rabin -- as now, heartsick, it eulogizes him -- for his willingness to reach out in peace to the Arab enemies he had fought for so long. The final tragedy of this man is that he could not extend the same hand of peace to his opponents at home.

"They" didn't distribute the picture of Yitzchak Rabi as an SS officer, Avishai Raviv, then a government agent did.

And in his appearance on the Ted Koppel's famous "though shalt not kill" Nightline, Binyamin Netanyahu pointed out that when demonstrators shouted that Rabin was a traitor, he replied, "He's wrong he's not a traitor."

But more than anything, Friedman himself contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in Israel. Seven months later, when Netanyahu was elected, Friedman declared "The bad guys won."

I'm talking first and foremost about the one Israeli who got to vote twice. His name is Yigal Amir and he is the religious extremist who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Under Israeli law, even an assassin gets to vote. So last Wednesday, at the Ohalei Kedar Prison, Mr. Amir trudged out of his cell in shackles and cast his vote -- no doubt for Mr. Netanyahu. What poetic injustice. First Mr. Amir voted with a bullet and then he voted with a ballot. Having murdered the one Labor Party leader who would have certainly beaten Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Amir finished his work with an absurd legal flourish, sealing his ballot under the watchful eye of prison guards.

The problem with his premise is that it's wrong. A reporter in Israel at the time of Rabin's assassination had to know that the assassination did not help Netanyahu politically. His campaigning against Oslo was successful and just before Rabin's assassination Netanyahu had pulled ahead of the Prime Minister in polls. Rabin would not have "certainly" beaten Netanyahu.

As far as Netanyahu's campaign against Oslo goes, here's what Netanyahu wrote just before Oslo was signed.

Astonishingly, this bizarre proposal that would result in Lebanese-style terror havens alongside Israel's cities was negotiated without carefully consulting Israel's military command. Deputy Chief of Staff Amnon Shahak was first shown the plan only minutes before it was brought to the Cabinet for approval. Chief of Staff Ehud Barak confesses that it poses "grave security problems" for Israel.

But the greatest danger of the Rabin-Arafat plan is not terrorism but a full-fledged war that could be launched against Israel from the P.L.O. domain once it is formally recognized as a new Arab state. Indeed, the foundations of such a state are laid by Israel's consent to cede the land and all legislative authority within it to the P.L.O. As Yasir Arafat said on Thursday, "The Palestinian state is at hand and the Palestinian flag will soon fly over Jerusalem."

The second paragraph came true - even without the PLO establishing a state. It happened in 2000 with the so-called "Aqsa intifada" and it was repeated in 2008 with the rockets from Gaza. Netanyahu in 1993 was a lot more prescient than Thomas Friedman has ever been.

That Friedman would write a column riddled with such distortions, hypocrisy and outright lies so soon after hankering for a Communist government is more reason why he ought to be considered the world's worst columnist.

(h/t to the credulous Dion Nissenbaum)

Posted by SoccerDad at September 30, 2009 5:52 AM