Tom Friedman Errs

I received this from a friend, LBD:

Early this morning I noticed that Thomas Friedman had posted a column (2 am EDT) on the dangerous anti-Obama mood in the U.S., comparing it to the mood he felt in Israel prior to the Rabin assassination. He went on to say that a “Jewish settler thought he had a license to kill Rabin.”

No comments had been posted at that point. I sent in the first comment...a “point of order”saying that Yigal Amir was not a settler but a resident of Israel within in the 1949 armistice lines. A few hours later I saw that it was the first comment; this evening I saw it was missing. Why? Because they changed the column online.

It now reads:

…And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did...

I went there and found some additional bothersome dribble from Friedman:

I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

"They"?

How many?

Did the media 'centralize' the issue by repeating some ugly scenes representing several dozens to several hundreds out out tens of thousands so that it seemd it was a general opinion?

Were not the most vicious phenomena, like that Nazi officer montage, the work of three people, one of whom was a GSS agent acting as a provocateur?

And this:

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin

The simple fact is that Yigal Amir had decided to act very early on, before the "poisonous political environment".

Here:

According to the indictment, Yigal Amir decided after the September 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C., to kill Rabin in order to prevent the implementation of Israel's accord with the Palestinians. He turned to his brother Hagai and to Adani, who agreed to join the conspiracy, according to the prosecutors.

The charge sheet said the three initially considered blowing up Rabin's car, firing an anti-tank rocket into his apartment or putting nitroglycerin into his apartment's plumbing. Yigal Amir tried to approach Rabin twice before with a handgun before succeeding at the Nov. 4 peace rally

and here:

The two-year plot to kill Rabin

Sunday, 12 November 1995

A GROUP of religious Jews guided by militant rabbis hatched their plot to kill Yitzhak Rabin two years ago, immediately after he signed the agreement to withdraw from the West Bank,

If you read the NYTimes, you are not necessarily reading news.