http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=266797
As with Peter Beinart, so it is with Friedman. It seems no anti-Israeli accusation is too egregious for them to stoop to.After so many years of being wrong about the Palestinians being ready to make peace with Israel, it is difficult to take New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s Middle East advice columns seriously. But his latest effort in this genre contains some whoppers that got our attention even if they only provide more proof the veteran writer is still hopelessly out of touch with reality. – Jonathan Tobin, Commentary magazine, April 4, 2012
Beinart’s total disregard for reality, his sanctimonious obsession with moral abstractions, is a great obstacle to real reconciliation because it protects the enemies of peace while making impossible demands on those who really want it. – Daniel Doron, The Jerusalem Post, April 15, 2012
Hast thou betrayed my credulous innocence; With vizor’d falsehood and base forgery? – John Milton, Comus, 1634
The latest offerings of ignorance and arrogance from Peter Beinart and Tom Friedman triggered a deluge of well-deserved outrage and an array of caustic critiques of the dubious duo’s duplicitous drivel.
Betrayal of professional integrity
While several commendable ripostes were posted, the first two excerpts above caught my eye as being particularly apt in the way they conveyed the essence of Beinart’s and Friedman’s portrayals of reality – as hopelessly detached from the truth and devoid of context.
Indeed, both men have betrayed their professional integrity by conveying to their readers a picture which is not only wildly distorted and deceptive, but apparently deliberately so.
Both make the dismayed question of the “Lady” in Milton’s 17th-century masque regarding the exploitation of innocent credulity through falsehood and forgery distinctly apposite today.
In last week’s column I pointed out how much of Beinat’s condemnation of Israeli actions was founded on evidence that ranged from the flimsy to the false, and how his inflammatory accusations were based on a selective and slanted presentation of events. This week I will focus on the New York Times’ Friedman.