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• Wednesday, January 7, 2009 07:50 PM

  Publicola

  omooex: "Like Friedman, you misinterpret the ideology of Hamas as the basis for Hamas' struggle."

  I don't know where you get that incorrect assumption, but you are nonetheless wrong.

  But you said:

  "And Islamists - including Hamas - are indeed in a war against modernity."

  You said this yourself.

  In any case, you're right. I didn't mean to put Islamic in quotes, any more than I put the word modernity in quotes. But I have no doubt its what he meant; Islamist for such as Friedman is nothing but a convenient semaphore for Arab. This is the same man, who, as you can see further in the article, once told Charlie Rose that the US should go house to house and shove guns in the faces of all young Arab men--not Islamists. Here is the full quote:

  "What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. That Charlie is what this war is about. We could of hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could of hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

  I have no doubt from this statement that Friedman has very strong feelings about all muslims in general, especially Arab ones. I can't see how you would defend him.

  But the reality is both you and Friedman fundamentally ignore settlement building because you treat it as some kind of ancillary element to the conflict. You said:

  "I am in fact a strong critic of the Israeli settlements because I am fully aware of how much and why they undermine the peace process."

  I'm not sure why you validate Israel's negotiations as a peace process when they have been colonizing the West Bank for thirty years without pause. They doubled their settler population in the West Bank between 1993 and 1999, just as they were supposedly involved in a peace process which was supposed to see the return of those very lands to Palestinians. This is like saying the US was in a peace process with native americans as it subsumed more and more of their land. And we all know where that ended up.

  Friedman opines that Hamas' activities are a greater obstacle to a state solution than settlement building. There can be no greater obstacle--settlement building is at the core of the conflict. It predates the rise of Hamas and Israel has always found a convenient rationale to continue, even though the process endangers Israelis and almost guarantees that a two state settlement will never be possible.

  You seem like a smart enough guy. I can't see how you'd defend Friedman. His disastrous support of the Iraq conflict--especially in light of the quote above-- should be more than enough for any sane person to automatically shy away from anything he has to say.

  —omooex Read omooex's other letters
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