Guest Blog on Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman's amazing ability to write from 1992

Thanks to Mitt Romney, we can again see Tom Friedman's hypocrisy.

His latest screed starts off with this:

Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.
Super right-wing! Evil Republican candidates seeking Jewish money! Jewish multibillionaires controlling US policy! Let's try to get every offensive stereotype out there and call it humor, shall we? (Not to mention that no one calls it the Wailing Wall nowadays except for Arabs and Tom Friedman.)

But it is Friedman's charge that Romney has no interest in learning anything new about the Middle East that is most ironic. Because this column shows that Friedman still thinks that we are in the early days of the peace process, somewhere between the Madrid conference and the Oslo accords. 

He writes:

While Romney had time for a $50,000-a-plate breakfast with American Jewish donors in Jerusalem, with Adelson at his elbow, he did not have two hours to go to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, to meet with its president, Mahmoud Abbas, or to share publicly any ideas on how he would advance the peace process...

Romney did meet with a Palestinian Arab leader: Salam Fayyad. You know, the person who Friedman has lavishly praised as the greatest hope for Palestinians. And a funny thing happened as a result: Fayyad was criticized by Palestinian Arabs, including from the Fatah organization, for meeting Romney! Does that sound like a peace partner to Friedman?...

...Friedman remains in a time warp, stuck in a twenty year old reality.
It isn't Romney who refuses to learn new facts - it is Thomas Friedman.

Read it all.

And Martin Sherman.

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