OMG, what an smug idiot Thomas @NYTFriedman is ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

OMG, what an smug idiot Thomas @NYTFriedman is

It's bad enough that the New York Times Tom Friedman is ignorant. But the fact that he thinks he is brilliant is what makes his columns so terrible. He is more interested in play-acting being an expert than in actual analysis.

Iran’s flawed strategic doctrine, which was also practiced by its proxy, Hezbollah, to equally bad results, is a doctrine I call trying to out-crazy an adversary. Iran and Hezbollah are always ready to go all the way, thinking that whatever their opponents might do in response, Hezbollah or Iran will always outdo them with a more extreme measure.

[W]here it fell short was Iran and Hezbollah thinking they could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Iran and Hezbollah are delusional in this regard — Hamas, too. They keep referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise, with no indigenous connection to the land, and therefore they assume the Jews will eventually meet the same fate as the Belgians in the Belgian Congo. That is, under enough pressure they will eventually go back to their own version of Belgium.

But the Israeli Jews have no Belgium. They are as indigenous to their biblical homeland as the Palestinians, no matter what “anticolonial” nonsense they teach at elite universities. Therefore, you will never out-crazy the Israeli Jews. If push comes to shove, they will out-crazy you.

They will play by the local rules, and yes, those are not the rules of the Geneva Conventions. They are the rules of the Middle East, which I call Hama Rules — named after the Hama attacks perpetrated by the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad in 1982, the aftermath of which I covered. Al-Assad wiped out the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama by mercilessly leveling whole swaths of the city, whole blocks of apartments, into a parking lot. Hama rules are no rules at all.

Friedman makes it sound like he is pro-Israel - he admits Jews are indigenous to the land. (Stating the obvious is not exactly groundbreaking.) But he insists that they are no better than Syria was in Hama - that they disregard the Geneva Conventions, and human rights. This is a blood libel, one that is currently on the front cover of the New York magazine.

Israel follows the rules of international law. The IDF has lawyers embedded in all levels of decision making. The average IDF soldier has studied the laws of war when he or she is 19 more extensively than Tom Friedman has in fifty years.

The problem is that Western self-declared experts don't know the first thing about the Geneva Conventions, which are quite reasonable in how they allow wars to be waged. They don't know how independent tribunals have defined "proportionality" and "distinction" in ways that would allow Israel to go way beyond what it has done in Gaza. They don't know that the laws of war give Israeli military commanders latitude to decide to attack based on the best current intelligence information, even if it is found out to be flawed later (for example, not knowing about an explosives cache hidden among the target that makes the resulting secondary explosions kill many civilians.)

I wish I had a dollar for every time, after some murderous attack on Israeli Jews by Palestinians or Iranian proxies, the Israeli government declared that it was going to solve the problem with force “once and for all.”

There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, Gaza and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture.

Really? Israel would need to occupy Iran? Does Friedman really think Iranians love their government and will defend it until forced to change it? What planet does he live on? Iranians do not want to live under the mullahs. Can he really be so clueless?

Ah, but Friedman lives on a planet where he is the wise decisionmaker and can solve all problems.

Which brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal.” If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.

One, that he will equip Israel’s Air Force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and U.S. trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated. Only if Iran completely complies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force.

So simple! Just offer to give Israel B-2s!

Except that even highly trained pilots need 6-9 months to learn how to fly a B-2. It would take an additional 6 months at least to train for a specific mission like bombing Fordow. And that is just for starters - a B-2 is a strategic stealth bomber, not a fighter, which is an entirely different mindset than Israeli pilots are used to. Beyond that, the US is unlikely to share the B-2 with anyone for security reasons.

In other words, if Trump would make that offer, Iran could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that he just gave them at least 15 months to plan and pressure Israel to end the war, and they would make a reasonable assumption that Trump is bluffing anyway.

But Friedman's delusions are only starting:

At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognizes the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination. But to realize that, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leadership that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.

Oh, remember linkage? The idea that the Palestinian issue is the linchpin to the entire Middle East, and if Palestinians get a state then all the other problems go away? It was never true, and the Abraham Accords proved it. (So does Iran’s nuclear weapons program. So does Hezbollah’s use of the Shebaa Farms as an excuse to continue to exist after 2000. So does the Houthi missiles and drones aimed at Israel.) Friedman thinks that Iran's animosity towards Israel is because it cares so much about Palestinians, when in fact those nuclear bombs that they were secretly working on would have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians along with Jews.

“Palestine” is not what causes antisemitism. It is simply today/s excuse for antisemites.

Not to mention that a Palestinian state would not bring peace. It would invite more war. Because the entire purpose of a Palestinian state in part of the British Mandate area, as Arafat said repeatedly, is a stage to get in a better position to take over all of Israel.

There are plenty of bad Middle East analysts. But few of them have Tom Friedman's smug self-assurance that their ideas are so brilliant that they outlast events that prove them wrong.