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Deja vu — Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Judith Apter Klinghoffer

FRIEDMAN'S MORAL EQUIVALENCY ENABLES IMMORAL FREE RIDERS

Tom Friedman's latest column is called On the Eve of Madness (it is posted bellow). He is both wrong and guilty. He is wrong because he characterizes the growing Middle Eastern chaos as "madness" instead of "hell." He is guilty because he continues to practice the immoral equivalency which helps sustain this Middle Eastern descent to hell by attributing the descent to mental illness. Indeed, it is Friedman, not Bush, who lives in an ideological bubble. For it is Friedman who cannot write with moral clarity and it is Friedman who fails to understand that the reason Bush is radioactive is not that he lacks moral authority because of the American "performance" in Iraq. He is radioactive because Bush, as even Friedman admits, speaks (if not acts) with moral clarity at a time when the intellectual establishment is fighting as ruthlessly as the terrorists to delegitimize such clarity.

Consider his argument:

And I mean madness. We’ve seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we’ve seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we’ve seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we’ve seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we’ve seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.

There is nothing irrational about a young man blowing himself up to kill Shia "apostates" or Jewish "infidels" in the belief that it is a way to a paradise where 72 virgins await his favors. Nor are the Sunni elders (including Islamists Jordanian parliamentarians), who exploit his naivete in a rather successful bid to hold on to power, mad. They are evil.

There is nothing irrational in Shiite militiamen torturing Sunnis by drilling holes in their heads with power tools. They are trying to create a cadre of vicious desensitized killers (like Hezbullah or the Lord's army of Uganda) able to hold democratic governments hostage as well as sow counter-terror in a Sunni community unimpressed by years of Shia community restraint. They are evil.

There is nothing irrational in Israel leveling a building used by a terrorist organization dedicated to it's elimination to sows death and destruction amongst its citizens. It would be irrational to avoid doing so for it would merely encourage further the practice of turning innocents into human shields. Leaflets calling on citizens to abandon the areas about to be bombed are designed to minimize innocent death. Friedman's inability to distinguish between mass murder and justified self defense attests to his moral/ideological blindness. The same moral blindness which leads him to call equate evil with madness.

As evidenced from the cartoon above (and many like it), Friedman's moral blindness is not unique nor harmless. For it has led to the current fashion of equating vicious terrorists gangs like Hezbullah with the democratic state of Israel, the only country in the Middle East which has done what Friedman correctly berates the Arabs for failing to do. It has constructed an economy and society which produces inventions and medical breakthroughs from which the rest of the world can benefit.

How can tying Israel's hand in order to give Hezbullah/Iran/Syria an opportunity to declare victory be declared moral without the assumption of immoral equivalence? And how could the international free riders, Friedman decries, continue their free riding without such an assumption in the manner so accurately described by Friedman?

. . . it is also because China, Europe and Russia have become freeloaders off U.S. power. They reap enormous profits from the post-cold-war order that America has shaped, but rather than become real stakeholders in that order, helping to draw and defend redlines, they duck, mumble, waffle or cut their own deals.

They can do it because of the Friedmantype common liberal/Democratic moral confusion that leads as sophisticated analyst of the region as Martin S. Indyk, the US ambassador to Israel under Clinton, to describe the consequences of Secretary Rice's refusal to succumb to Hezbulla/Iranian/Syrian demand for unconditional cease fire, moral. Indyk said: "Everybody else took a free moral ride while she took the blame."Blame for what? For being "immoral?"

Indeed, it is the fashionable moral obfuscation such as the one which permeates Friedman's column which enables those acting like Chamberlain become equated with morality while acting like Churchill with immorality. It is that equation which enable Fascist China, cowardly Europe and power hungry Russia not only to benefit economically and strategically from the status of free riders but avoid paying even a public relations price for so doing.

The opposite is also true. It is those equations which severely punish leaders like the magnificent Tony Blair who refuse to join the free riders. It is that equation that have placed Friedman and his fellow opinion makers on the side of the "immoral free riders" who help and abet those who placed the Middle East on the road that Friedman defines as "madness" instead of "hell." It is that equation that makes choosing evil cheaper and fighting it more expensive and it is time to call Friedman and ilk to account for making it so. July 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
On the Eve of Madness
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Damascus, Syria

Over Turkish coffee the other morning, I picked up a copy of The Syria Times, the local English-language paper, and my eye immediately went to a small box at the top of the front page. It said, “The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity ... P. 5.”

I thought: What a perfect way to describe the Middle East today — going back to some pre-modern era. Alas, The Syria Times was not trying to be ironic. It turned out the headline was the title of a book about Aleppo in the 18th century. But had it been a news headline it would have been apt.

Condoleezza Rice must have been severely jet-lagged when she said that what’s going on in Lebanon and Iraq today were the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Oh, I wish it were so. What we are actually seeing are the rebirth pangs of the old Middle East, only fueled now by oil and more destructive weaponry.

Some of the most primordial, tribal passions, which always lurk beneath the surface here — Sunnis versus Shiites, Jews versus Muslims, Lebanese versus Syrians — but are usually held in check by modern states or bonds of civilization, are exploding to the top.

There is nothing that you can’t do to someone in the Middle East today, and there is no leader or movement — no Nelson Mandela and no million-mom march — coming out of this region, or into this region, to put a stop to the madness.

And I mean madness. We’ve seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we’ve seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we’ve seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we’ve seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we’ve seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.

Now we’ve seen the Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, take all of Lebanon into a devastating, unprovoked war with Israel, just to improve his political standing and take pressure off Iran.

America should be galvanizing the forces of order — Europe, Russia, China and India — into a coalition against these trends. But we can’t. Why? In part, it’s because our president and secretary of state, although they speak with great moral clarity, have no moral authority. That’s been shattered by their performance in Iraq.

The world hates George Bush more than any U.S. president in my lifetime. He is radioactive — and so caught up in his own ideological bubble that he is incapable of imagining or forging alternative strategies.

In part, it is also because China, Europe and Russia have become freeloaders off U.S. power. They reap enormous profits from the post-cold-war order that America has shaped, but rather than become real stakeholders in that order, helping to draw and defend redlines, they duck, mumble, waffle or cut their own deals.

This does not bode well for global stability. A religious militia that calls itself “the party of God” takes over a state and drags it into war, using high-tech rockets — mullahs with drones — and the world is paralyzed. Those who ignore this madness will one day see it come to a theater near them.

In part, though, this madness is home-grown. I sat at a swank rooftop restaurant the other night with some young Syrian writers and listened to a discussion between a young woman dressed in trendy clothes, talking about how she would prefer to see Israel disappear, another writer who argued that Nasrallah was an Arab disaster, and an Arab journalist who described the “pride” and “dignity” every Arab felt at seeing Hezbollah fight Israel to a standstill.

When will the Arab-Muslim world stop getting its “pride” from fighting Israel and start getting it from constructing a society that others would envy, an economy others would respect, and inventions and medical breakthroughs from which others would benefit?

There will be no new Middle East — not as long as the New Middle Easterners, like Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, get gunned down; not as long as Old Middle Easterners, like Nasrallah, use all their wits and resources to start a new Arab-Israeli war rather than build a new Arab university; and not as long as Arab media and intellectuals refuse to speak out clearly against those who encourage their youth to embrace martyrdom with religious zeal rather than meld modernity with Arab culture.

Without that, we are wasting our time and the Arab world is wasting its future. It will forever be “on the eve of modernity.”