Forty years have passed since the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made her most profound observation — before the ludicrous era of suicide bombings was launched:
“Only when the Arabs love their own children more than they hate Jews will we have peace in the Middle East.”
Because they feel culturally and intellectually inferior to Jews, Arabs and Muslims have been proudly, openly assassinating Jews in Israel, and elsewhere, without relief, since Israel gained statehood on May 14, 1948.
The bad guys can’t believe that there are millions of them in 21 Jew-hating countries encircling Israel, fighting a mere handful of Jews, and still they can’t destroy their pesky enemies.
For 62 years, Israel has been ready to make peace with Arabs. But by George, these sterling fellows never are quite ready. Their stockings had a run in them. There were clouds in the sky, and that was a perilous omen.
That the world takes these Arab clowns seriously decades later attests to the pathetic paucity of serious knowledge and insights into the Arab world.
The Left in our country and most others, dominates the media, which means the primary value that we are taught by the media is to treasure our feelings above all else.
If it feels good, do it.
Why do you think radical Islam has been in the ascendancy, uninterrupted, for the last 25 years? Because politicians and journalists on the Left don’t really believe that vile Muslim terrorists are vile Muslim terrorists. They are just like you and me, except maybe mildly different.
You recall that last year Barack (Where Am I? Where Are We Going?) Obama last year ordered all references to Islamic terrorism struck from written and oral communications because it was offensive to Muslims and to the President himself.
Sunny View from the Left
This discussion is relevant this afternoon because the much-decorated, often laughable Tom Friedman of The New York Times, who regards himself as the foremost American expert on the Middle East, never has accepted the validity of Ms. Meir’s sagacious observation. He is little man with an outsized ego who feels superior to us peasants, especially us Republican peasants because he is ruled by compassionate feelings.
As a runt, he learned in his childhood that the fastest way to attract needed attention to himself was to make outrageous statements about his feelings.
Like most prominent lefties, Mr. Friedman feels there is only a straw’s worth of difference between terrorists and Republicans.
Mr. Friedman feels that the threat of terrorism is grossly exaggerated by conservatives. He feels all living terrorists, a term he would use qualifiedly, are redeemable, unworthy of punishment.
If majority Jewish thinking were reflected in Mr. Friedman’s routinely unreflective mind, the Arabs would have triumphed decades ago, and Freddy O’Brien would be writing this essay.
And so last Sunday, under the headline “Can We Talk?” Mr. Friedman wrote one of his most under-inspected essays, which achieved its mission — drawing international attention to his exposed feelings.
Quivering with rage throughout the red-faced essay, his feelings raced forth and back between anger and apologia.
A few days earlier there had been a brief media dustup when CNN canned its senior editor for the Middle East, Octavia Nasr. Tweeting about one of the region’s oiliest terrorists, she wrote: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Hussein Fadlallah,” whom she described as “one of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”
Named for the American film star of a century ago, Faddy Arbuckle, S. Hussein Fadlallah was a power behind numerous suicide bombings in Israel. Evilly, he openly led his hateful minions in cheering each time clusters of Israeli civilians were dismembered
Dipping deeply into his Feelings Bag, Mr. Friedman grouchily said he could not understand how CNN could be such a mean employer. Octavia, he said, is a nice Lebanese Christian who is entitled to her, you will excuse the imaginative expression, feelings. Can’t a girl have her own opinions? he wondered.
He devoted the largest section of his essay to praise for the terrorist. Personally insecure and evidently incapable of reasoning through a theory, despite three Pulitzer Prizes, Mr. Friedman did what the Left commonly does, sniping, like a child, at Republicans, which is SOP. He said that because CNN obviously only wants employees who blindly hew to the American line for the Middle East, they are foolishly emulating President Bush whom he said only hired loyalists.
He argues, densely, that the only way the Middle East will change is from within, change that will be authored by legitimate members of Arab society. This does not fit into the category of seminal thinking.
Relying on his feelings again the way a 450-pound man leans on a rubber cane, Mr. Friedman says that terrorists may not “be America’s cup of tea. But we need to know about them, and understand where our interests converge — not just demonize them all.”
Stroke ‘em, baby, until your arm gets tired.
The remarkably naïve Mr. Friedman feels there are good terrorists and bad terrorists.
I suppose a bad terrorist kills a hundred Jews. But a good terrorist, a model for our children, only destroys 99 Jews.
