The Daily Beast website reported that Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, advocates for a bloody conflict in the Middle East using vulgar metaphors that dehumanize Muslims by likening them to insects and parasites, and has been described as an advocate for both justified and unjustified war.
The columnist, Ben Barghouti, explained that Friedman was the most enthusiastic supporter at The New York Times for George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until his reputation was tarnished due to his constant calls for the United States needing “another 6 months” to change the course of the war and achieve a “decent outcome,” prompting the six-month period to be dubbed “the Friedman unit”.
Barghouti noted that, based on his knowledge of Friedman’s record, he should not have been surprised by his recent contribution to making the American discourse on foreign policy more bloodthirsty and naive. Friedman wrote in a prestigious newspaper that he “prefers to think” about the complexities of war and politics in the Middle East and went on to say, “According to the journal Science Daily, a wasp injects its eggs into a caterpillar, then the tiny wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar (the second larval stage of insect growth) from the inside out until it bursts once the larvae are sated.”
After reciting this scientific fact, Friedman asked, “Is there a better description for Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq today than that they are caterpillars, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp? Where the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Hezbollah Brigades are the eggs that hatch inside the host and devour it from within and then burst?” He commented, “We have no counter-strategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting the whole forest on fire.”
In contrast, he imagined a journalist who found the comparison extremely vile, “If a widely-read newspaper wrote an editorial comparing Israeli soldiers and settlers to termites, for example, and said that the difficulty Iran and Hamas face is figuring out how to kill the termites (safely and efficiently) without blowing up the entire house, would that be worse than what Friedman wrote?”
The writer described Friedman’s speech as not worse in this hypothetical case than in the real world context, as it returns to this type of inhumane colonial metaphors, at a time when Israel has caused the displacement of 1.9 million residents of Gaza, and the International Court of Justice issued a temporary ruling stating that there was a “real and imminent danger” of “genocide.”
In such dire circumstances in Gaza and the possibility of “genocide” as indicated by the International Court, Friedman likens the United States and Israel to people struggling with a sad dilemma on how to kill “the wasp and its eggs,” including “the egg” Hamas in Gaza, without burning down the entire area.
Facing Iran with aggressiveness
Although Friedman, as the writer says, is not a fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and considers him extremely extremist, and is an advocate of the two-state solution, he does not call on Israel to agree to a long-term ceasefire, nor does he see the United States backing away decisively from a broader regional war on the brink of breaking out.
In his latest article in The New York Times, before he contemplated the Middle East as a forest full of wasps, Friedman stated that the problem with Netanyahu’s positions is that he makes it more difficult for Washington.
He called on the United States to rally “the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Arab and Muslim allies it needs to confront Iran more aggressively,” hoping that this act of aggression “does not turn into a full-scale war.”
As Tehran is in a much stronger position than it was when George W. Bush waged his wars at the beginning of the 21st century, this war will be far worse, and thus if the United States imposes its will in the “forest” of the Middle East and “confronts Iran more aggressively,” how many atrocities will “Friedman units” inflict on ordinary people wishing to live their lives in that “forest”?
This is something a Pulitzer Prize winner should stop and think about, if he allows himself to remember that the inhabitants of the countries where the United States and Israel wage war are human beings, not caterpillars hosting parasitic wasp eggs.
