Tom Friedman: Fabricating the Roots of Terror
by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
July 28, 2005



 

“[W]e fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours. . .  Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.” 

-- Osama Bin Laden, Al Jazeera, November 1, 2004

 “The root cause of suicide terrorism is occupation, not Islam.”

 -- Robert Pape, “Al Qaeda’s Smart Bombs,” NY Times, July 9, 2005

Tom Friedman is the undeclared spokesman of the American establishment. His articles represent a distillation of the current thinking among a broad range of American mandarins, particularly members of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the driving force behind much of America’s foreign policy. He is the imperial chronicler, the man responsible for promoting the narrow interests of elites and transforming the crimes of the empire into a narrative of generosity and goodwill. If one can decode Friedman’s bi-weekly hieroglyphic, they can also understand how elites use the media to manage public perceptions.

In his latest article, “Giving the Hate-mongers No Place to Hide,” Friedman offers his views on both terrorism and free speech. He argues that we should pay greater attention to “hate speech” and try to grasp its relationship to terrorism. Friedman sees this overheated rhetoric as such an imminent threat that he thinks “the State Department should identify the top 10 hate-mongers” and provide their names to the public.

Apart from the McCarthy-like overtones of Friedman’s proposal, it’s hard to believe that his contemporaries in talk-radio would be very enthusiastic about this new idea. After all, sectarian and racial hatred have become staples on the country’s airwaves, with many of the nation’s top broadcasters savaging gays and Muslims on a routine basis. As Friedman knows, the issue of hate speech is normally a question of “whose ox is being gored.”

But, Friedman’s intention is not to take aim at the “accepted” institutions of discrimination and racism within the body politic, but to single out Muslims who vent their rage at American foreign policy and subject them to public intimidation. This can be accomplished by developing a State Department “blacklist” of anyone who utters a word against the Fatherland and, presumably, its junior partner, Israel.

“Words matter,” Friedman opines. “We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears…When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.”

Friedman’s comments echo the Stalinesque directive from Donald Rumsfeld in May of 2005: “People need to be very careful about what they say as well as very careful about what they do.”

Indeed, they do, but is that the function of government, to silence those with an unpopular point of view? Or, are Friedman and Rumsfeld’s remarks simply intended to have a chilling effect on free speech?

More importantly, does “hate speech” really generate terrorism or is there a more identifiable source?

While Friedman may be concerned with “shutting people up,” he’s much less concerned with the real origins of terror. His own paper, The New York Times, ran a very scholarly article just three weeks ago by Robert Pape, “Al Qaeda’s Smart Bombs” (7/9/05), which dismissed many of the commonly held illusions about terrorism. Pape, who documented every case of suicide bombing between 1980 and 2004, says that the “core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism” is “a nationalistic response to occupation”; “The root cause of terrorism is occupation, not Islam.”

Wow.

Pape’s “fact-based” analysis directly challenges Friedman’s “hate mongering” theory of terror. The distinction between the two hypotheses is colossal. If Friedman is correct then the West is justified in invading Muslim countries to rid them of, what Tony Blair called, “an evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of Islam.” This is the rationale that supports the US occupation of Iraq, presenting the conflict as “the central battlefield in the war on terror.”

However, if Pape’s analysis is right then the real catalyst for terrorism is the American occupation itself, a permanent recruiting sergeant for Muslim extremists and jihadis. If that were the case, the only reasonable solution would be a quick transfer of power and a complete withdrawal of American forces.

This is not a debate that Friedman or his colleagues in the corporate establishment can afford to lose. Pape threatens to derail the Iraqi master plan by simply presenting the facts of his investigation and changing the hearts and minds of the American public. That explains why every media bullhorn is feverishly broadcasting some variant of Friedman’s “hate mongering” theory: trying to keep alive the fading belief that America is fighting “Islamo-fascism” in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. It is a storyline that grows more threadbare by the day.

The UK Independent’s Patrick Cockburn delivered a stunning blow to Friedman’s theory last Tuesday in his aptly named article, “Iraq: The Unwinnable War.”  Cockburn states:

“The findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organization previous to 2003. It was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their decision to die.

Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalized by Iraq alone.”

“No contact with Al Qaida”?... “All had been radicalized by Iraq alone”?

Do we need more proof then this or can we put to rest Friedman’s musty ideas about Muslim “evil-doers”. The source of the problem is not in the heart of Islam but in the sanctuaries of the American plutocracy, where fantasists who never held a rifle dreamt of leading the nation to war. Their muddled vision has now produced the greatest wave of terror the world has ever seen.

Friedman scrupulously tiptoes around the facts so he can shift the blame onto his favorite whipping boy: radical Islam. But the problem is not the “cancer in their midst,” as Friedman claims, but the cancer in ours. “Hate mongers” were not responsible for the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. That was the cynical calculation of American mandarins and their political operatives in the White House. The war has reaped a firestorm of terror and Friedman’s fabrications just keep fanning the flames.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state, and can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Related Articles: DV's Tom Friedman Watch (barf bag recommended)

* Thomas Friedman, Liberal Sadist? by Norman Solomon
* A Muslim Problem by M. Shahid Alam
* The Boots On the Ground in Iraq: One Size Fits All by Harold Williamson
* The Friedman Solution: Reinstate the Draft by Mike Whitney
* Tom Friedman: The Imperial Chronicler by Mike Whitney
* Folksy Tom Friedman and New Age Imperialism
* Tommy Boy Friedman Does "Imagine" by Mickey Z.
* Outsourcing the Friedman by Naomi Klein
* Friedman's Education: Tommy Pats Good Little Indians on the Head by Mickey Z.
* Rhetorical Absurdities by Kim Petersen
* Shifting the Blame: Now it’s Mr. Chirac’s Fault by Kim Petersen
* Not Getting It: The Mind of Thomas Friedman by Kim Petersen
* Fraudulent Thomas Embraces Wolfie the Liberator by Ahmed Amr
* Illuminating Thomas Friedman by M. Shahid Alam
* Thomas Friedman’s Life As A Pet Hamster by John Chuckman
* Hoodwinked? by Kim Petersen
* Return to Sender by Kim Petersen
* The New York Times' Dynamic Duo by Matthew Riemer
* Thomas Friedman: A Columnist of Awesome Vulgarity by Viajay Prashad

Other Articles by Mike Whitney

* The Globalization of State Terror
* “Withdrawal” from Iraq?: Forget About It  
* Doomsday: The Final Months of the “Housing Bubble”
* John Roberts and the National Security State
* Guantanamo: the Calculus of Human Misery
* Did Greenspan Know About the London Bombings Two Days Before?
* Another Casualty in Rumsfeld’s Information War
* Genesis of an American Gestapo
* Bush's Orgy of Carnage
* Goodbye to Sandra Day O’ Connor . . . and Good Riddance
* The Rumsfeld Solution: “Liberating Iraq, One Journalist at a Time”
* Show Your Independence on the 4th -- Burn a Flag
* "Up in Smoke": Bush Flops in Prime Time
* More Rumsfeld Lies About Insurgent Meetings
* Incinerating Iraqis: The Napalm Cover-Up
* Guantanamo: The New-World Icon
* The Bush Radio Address: More Delusional Blather While Iraq Bleeds
* The Friedman Solution: Reinstate the Draft
* Body Slamming the 4th Amendment
* Operation Desperation: Rumsfeld’s Baghdad Fiasco
* The EU Constitution: Don’t Believe the BS
* Protecting the Plutocrats
* What Was Laura Bush Doing at the Al Aqsa Mosque?
* Free Jose Padilla!
* Alberto Gonzales’ Kristallnacht: Purges for a Safer America
* Tom Friedman: The Imperial Chronicler
* Gods, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw
* A Tentative Strategy for Ending the War
* The Specter of Violence in America
* Free Speech in the Crosshairs
* Why America Needs to be Defeated in Iraq
* More Madness at the Bush News Conference
* Ratzinger’s Plan to Hide the Pedophiles
* Let’s Let Atheists Back into Politics
* Pope Ratzinger: More “Pie-in-the-Sky” for the Struggling Masses
* The Purveyors of Violence: The NY Times in Falluja
* Screw You, Paul Volker!
* Pope TV and the New World Media
* The Economic Tsunami: Sooner Than You Think
* Destroy Abu Ghraib!
* Terri Schiavo and the Battered Judiciary
* Railroading Moussaoui
* The Wolfowitz Appointment: A Red Flag for the Coming Wars
* “Economic Meltdown” -- Sorry, but We’re Toast
* John Bolton and the Road to Tehran
* Clearing the Way for the American Police State
* Challenging the Language of Violence
* Jose Padilla and the 10 Commandments
* Crushing the UN for a Stronger America
* Europe to Bush: “Hands Off Iran”?
* The Incredible Shrinking Dollar
* Assassinating Al-Hariri Fits Washington’s Plan
* Washington’s Plan to Foment Civil War in Iraq
* Condi’s Euro-Tour
* Folksy Tom Friedman and New Age Imperialism
* Government Without Consent
* The Desperate State of the Union
* Iraq’s Election Fiasco
* Boarding Up the “Window of Opportunity”
* KGB Chieftain Finds Home at Homeland Security
* Bush’s Grand Plan: Incite Civil War
* Pink Slips at CBS

HOME