Thomas Friedman at the NY Times: A 30-Year Legacy of Anti-Israel Rhetoric
By Moshe Phillips
Moshe Phillipsis national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization. www.AFSI.org
Longtime New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been using the editorial pages of the newspaper to criticize Israel for over 30 years.
Friedman often overlooks facts in his efforts to harm Israel. In his February 13 column Friedman provides two glaring examples of this.
Friedman states that “every U.S. president since George H.W. Bush” supported the creation of a Palestinian state. In fact, President George H.W. Bush never publicly advocated a Palestinian state, and neither did Bill Clinton while he was president. American presidents in office have supported Palestinian Arab statehood in only 21 of the 76 years since Israel was established. For the other 55 of those years, a Palestinian state was not part of US policy.
Friedman writes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has refused to ever identify a plan to translate Israel’s military victory in Gaza into a sustainable political one.” The truth, though, is that Netanyahu has repeatedly articulated a very clear plan: to turn over rule of Gaza to non-Hamas residents, to demilitarize the territory, and to deradicalize the Gaza school system and media, so young Gazans will no longer be raised to hate and kill Jews—exactly as the U.S. and its allies did in Germany after World War II.
The fact that it may be hard to find non-Hamas Gazans, and may take longer than Friedman would like, is not Israel’s fault—it’s the natural result of decades of antisemitic indoctrination.
For half a century now Tom Friedman has been struggling to get Americans to adopt a Blame Israel First Policy.
It was on November 12, 1974, that Friedman began his career in attacking Israel. That was the day he and some fellow-students at Brandeis University placed an open letter in The Brandeis Justice (the student newspaper) denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the American Jewish community for opposing Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the United Nations.
Friedman and his friends declared that the mass Jewish rally outside the UN would "only reinforce Jewish anxiety and contribute to Israel's further isolation." They demanded that Prime Minister Rabin "negotiate with all factions of the Palestinians, including the PLO." Remember that it was a time when the PLO was not even pretending to be moderate or ready to live in peace with Israel. He appeared at the UN carrying an olive branch and a gun, and AP and others publicized pictures that concealed that fact. Just months earlier, PLO terrorists had proudly massacred dozens of Israeli schoolchildren in the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Ma'alot.
Friedman was very proud of his pro-PLO extremist position—until a few years later, when he realized that it would be to his advantage to pretend he had never criticized Israel before.
In 1982, Friedman was a junior reporter on the staff of the Times when he was assigned to cover the Israel-Lebanon war. He wrote a series of front page articles denigrating Israel, then turned those articles into a 1989 best-selling book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. Its theme was that he was a strong supporter of Israel until he saw Israel’s actions in Lebanon, which “disillusioned him” and made him into a critic of Israel. And that canard has been the theme of his very lucrative career ever since.
The entire premise of the book was a lie, as his attacks on Israel at Brandeis demonstrated. But in the pre-internet era, reporters weren’t going to take the trouble to comb through back issues of a student newspaper in Massachusetts. So Friedman got away with it.
As the Times’s bureau chief in Jerusalem from 1984-1988, and then as a Times op-ed columnist ever since, he has been one of Israel’s harshest critics in America. He has even tried to influence U.S. foreign policy. According to then Secretary of State James Baker, Friedman would feed him anti-Israel policy advice when the two played tennis.
Baker credited Friedman for the notorious episode in which Baker publicly humiliated Israel by sarcastically announcing the White House phone number and declaring that the Israelis should call when they got serious about peace.
Over the years, Friedman’s rhetoric has become even more extreme.
In his Times column of February 5, 2004, Friedman declared that Israel’s prime minister has “had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office…surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates…”
Friedman also claimed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Jewish lobbyists, Vice President Cheney, and unnamed “political handlers” were “all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing [regarding Israel].” Former New York City mayor Ed Koch called Friedman’s statement, with its conspiratorial allegations about Jews, “an anti-Semitic slur.”
In his December 13, 2011 column for the Times, Friedman actually wrote that the standing ovations Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received when he addressed Congress that year were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” !
On November 19, 2013, Friedman wrote that there is “a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”
If a white supremacist accused Jews of bribing Congress, controlling the president, and “killing for killing’s sake,” he would be universally denounced as a bigot. It’s hard to see why Tom Friedman doesn’t deserve to be described the same way.
