Column can be found here
Thanks Angry Arab News Service
From Friedman's column today: "The brutally honest Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis, gave an interview from Paris on March 11, 2006, with Dubai TV*, and warned of what’s at stake (translation by Memri): “The Arab individual is no less smart, no less a genius, than anyone else in the world. He can excel — but only outside his society." Really? But Adonis' own career refutes that theory. Adonis excelled but only INSIDE his society. He excelled when he wrote in Syria and Lebanon; but when he went OUTSIDE his society, he never wrote anything memorable.
*No. Friedman does not watch Arab TV; and can't understand it even if he watches it. But he can read MEMRI reports..
PS And shouldn't Adonis offer some royalties to the estate of Raphael Patai? I mean, he never offers any observations on Arab society that were not mentioned in The Arab Mind.
From Unclaimed Territory
the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal "hawks" and thereby creating "consensus" support for Bush's war -- Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as "the nation's preeminent centrist foreign policy genius."
Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite -- amazingly enough, I think it's more accurate to say "because of" -- his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America's history.
No comments:
Post a Comment