I’m late getting round to reading the NYT today. But credit where credit is due. Tom Friedman:
- I am a big Joe Biden fan… So it pains me to say that on his recent trip to Israel, when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government rubbed his nose in some new housing plans for contested East Jerusalem, the vice president missed a chance to send a powerful public signal: He should have snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country.”
You’re too kind
Friedman in the same piece:
“Netanyahu’s actual policies on the ground there have helped Palestinians grow their economy and put in place their own rebuilt security force, which is working with the Israeli Army to prevent terrorism; Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are as genuine and serious about working toward a solution as any Israel can hope to find”
Friedman hews to the party line, that the offense to Biden was procedural rather than substantive. What we ordinary Americans want emphasized is Biden’s remarks in reaction, that the Israeli occupation behaviors are costing lives of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Biden’s remarks about Israel endangering US troops in the mideast did not come out of the blue or just an angry retort.Foreign Policy has an article up about how Petraeus meet with Mullen and informed the White House that this is the situation. Here is the article.
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story
“Friedman hews to the party line, ”
No, things are changing.
Didn’t want to imply otherwise.
Regarding Perry’s article linked above: Israel’s long-standing policy of occupying Palestine and oppressing Palestinians is not in America’s best interest? Who knew? Thank you so much Petraeus and Mullen for revealing this heretofore unknown fact. I bet that people like MJ Rosenburg and Helena Cobban never ever thought of it.
Of course it’s only the behavior of Israel that’s at fault here, and not the wanton murder of various Muslim people by the US military. Oh no, let’s put it all on Israel.
And Joe, thank you too. Even a Zionist can face facts sometimes, especially when one is on the receiving end of a personal insult, which is possibly a new event for Joe the Zionist.
Not sure why we should be praising Friendman here. Note how he just has to refer to East Jerusalem as ‘contested’ when under international law, it is unambiguously ‘occupied’. And the analogy to drunk driving is the usual Friedman puerile nonsense. And again, like always in the US reation to this ‘snub’ the perceived sin is not that Israel is building on stolen land, in defiance both of international law and previous pledges, but that they ’embarrassed’ some jobbing US politician. Priorities, priorities…
Friedman deserves no credit whatsoever, ever. Being a horrible writer for years with horrible ideas that have caused untold sufferings and harms carries no penalty in America. Instead it leads to riches and career advancement. But that’s a problem, not a good thing. The occasional slightly witted remark does the man no credit. If anything, it suggests that he actually is smart enough to know better the rest of the time.
What Biden said privately appears to show a US official FINALLY edging towards talking about something real. But that has been thrown away by the way the Obama administration has framed the situation publically, as a procedural issue of timing, and as an insult. This makes the US look petty and inherently raises the question of what the openly punked US administration is going to do about it. In the end, Obama will back down, further humiliated, with maybe some meaningless conciliatory gesture from Netanyahu to show for all the heat and drama.
So the real question is this: does
Obama screw up like this because he is a coward and an idiot? Or does he do it out of a profound cynicism, the cynicism of a supremely opportunistic politician, who has made a career out of getting the progressive movement to go for his ‘headfakes’ in their direction, which allows him to drive right for his real policy, which is an utter betrayal of everything his doe-eyed progressive apologists hold dear?
Come on people, wake up!! It’s not hard to figure out what we are dealing with in Obama. He is a smart, but brutally cynical opportunist – a typical pol, but smoother and smarter than most. The real question is what are we going to do about it and when do we start?
Joseph Biden deals with Israeli Politicians in context of English saying: ” you may ride a horse into water but you cannot make him drink “.
It’s a waste of time, I sttill believe Mr George Mitchell is fed up with this mission and will resign in the near future.
Hafid
“It’s a waste of time, I still believe Mr George Mitchell is fed up with this mission and will resign in the near future.”
Either that or a very big pay increase. This is what Harry Bridges would have categorised as a very dirty job.
Shuttling between Abbas and Netanyahu, with Lieberman and Dahlan on the side sounds extraordinarily gruelling to me.
Too much is being made of this. Israel has been building illegal settlements all along. All Bibi did was to acquaint Joe Biden, and the rest of the world, with the way Israel spells Piece Process.