What will it take for this man to be fired:
Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.
Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.
Tom Friedman deciding that the route to world peace is an Islamic civil war. I have no clever retort.
Kryptik
Just…stop, John, slow down, please.
There’s just too much bullshit going on the last few days for me to stomach a Friedman Special.
brent
We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things
I would have been embarrassed to write a sentence that reductive and simple-minded when I was in 6th grade.
Maude
He has lost whatever mind he had. This is crazy. Why does he always call for blood?
Violet
He just wants some Muslims to say, “Suck on this, Other Muslims!”
MattR
I can’t really say I disagree much with Friedman here. Yes, he is a bit flippant with the phrase “civil war”, but his bigger point is that Muslim extremists will not be defeated as long as the greater Muslim world allows/encourages it. I don’t think that is all too convtroversial an opinion.
donovong
The volume of pure stupid (Van den Huevos, Kos, TBogg, et. al.) that has been publicized on this blog today has been impossible to keep up with. This is just the cherry on top.
I hate cherries, too.
Robin G.
The stupid, it burns like acid.
I saw Friedman speak in October of 2002. My economics professor had a hard time not spitting on him.
arguingwithsignposts
Fact fail in the first statement. Not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. More are Asian, IIRC. Not even all fundamentalist Muslims are Arab.
It would be like saying only Europeans and Christians can fight the war of ideals within Christianity.
ETA: This graphjam is central to my point.
Chad S
They could use a reformation movement to question dogmatic practice. Civil war is a bit insane unless everyone wants to pay 20 dollars a gallon.
General Winfield Stuck
Well, I would agree that Muslims in their own lands should decide their own fates, by whatever means they want. Though hopefully by civil means, and that goes for any country and it’s citizens.
But the volatility in those countries, imo, comes a great deal from the meddling of the west. Largely due to oil, that has interrupted their natural social and political evolution to whatever that would end up. And no doubt created violent levels of anger above what would have been from us not propping up autocrat govments they hate.
So Friedman playing the civil war card smacks of detached hyprocisy, and rank stupidity, not to mention some osmotic concern for Israel’s fate that may be invading his neural net. He wouldn’t be the first in that regard.
Friedman is a insidious sumbitch, with just about enough reasonableness mixed in with crazy to be dangerous.
Just Some Fuckhead
Wonder what Lil Tommy would think of a Jewish civil war to take care of their violent minority?
Comrade Dread
We had a civil war for a lot of reasons. Lincoln, for quite some time, was willing to let slavery continue if the rebel states came back into the Union.
“Yeah, hi guys, it’s us, America. See we’ve recently fallen on some hard times and can no longer afford to indiscriminately invade your countries and shoot you, so if you could kind of start doing that for us, that’d be great, m’kay?”
MattR
@arguingwithsignposts: I really, really cannot believe this is my second post defending Friedman, but I though he separated out Arabs and Muslims to be clear that they were not necessarily the same. I kinda took Arab to be shorthand for “non Muslim living in a Muslim dominated area”. Sure that doesn’t cover the Pesians, other Asians, etc but can the average NY Times reader really handle that level of detail.
Derelict
we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.
But, of course, Muslims would easily forget all about such a civil war and happily go about their business. Never mind that large parts of the Muslim world bear a seething hatred of fucking Alexander the Great for his invasion 5,000 years ago. Nope–they’d just let bygones be bygones after an intra-religious war.
Annie
Friedman is an idiot. He contradicts his own argument. He compares apples to oranges and ignores context.
There already is an internal war going on in Muslim countries. Hasn’t he been watching the news in Iran? There are many committed Muslims that don’t buy into fundamentalism. Iraq is fighting internally between extremists, and those that really want to get on with their lives. Same with Afghanistan. There also is poverty, corruption, lack of education, and a host of other realities that feed into extremist capacities — Pakistan is a perfect example. Extremists have been quite adept at exploiting poor communities — hence Islamic education in areas that lack access to basic, more secular education.
RJ
Perhaps while he’s at it, Friedman can recommend Europe have a massive internal war to determine which language(s) should reign supreme.
Ailuridae
I’m a little confused by Friedman’s first sentence: does he really not understand that Arabs and Muslims are not one in the same and that neither is wholly contained within the other. Of course he does understand that then why conflate the two? If there is a coming war of ideas within Islam, non-Muslim Arabs have no more to say about it than Mika Brzezinski.
khead
We have to destroy the village to save it.
Ailuridae
@arguingwithsignposts:
You beat me to it.
Comrade Dread
Deleted because the edit function done blow up on me.
Violet
@MattR:
But if that’s the case, then why can “only Arabs” fight the “war of ideas within Islam”? That doesn’t make any sense. I can sort of go with his theory that only people within the religion can sort out the problems within the religion. But why then add in Arabs? Is he trying to say they are all Muslim? Not Muslim? Are non-Muslim Arabs such a huge majority as to warrant their own mention in sorting out problems with Islam? Huh?
And while he’s at it, why not include Pakistani terrorists? They’re South Asian and not Arab at all.
Friedman is just making sweeping generalizations about religion and culture without bothering with those pesky things called facts. As usual.
arguingwithsignposts
@MattR:
I would hope so. Why single out the Arabs? The country with the highest population of Muslims is Indonesia, which has its own fundamentalist factions. Also, Pakistan and Afghanistan are not arab countries, yet we see problems moreso there than in Saudi Arabia, for instance. See this wikipedia entry for a breakdown.
arguingwithsignposts
@Violet:
beat me to it.
Tx Expat
@Derelict:
Well, not quite 5,000 years ago. Muhammad didn’t even found Islam until 632 A.D., a little while after Alexander came through some parts of the (now) Muslim world.
OTOH, Shia’s still commemorate the death of Ali which sparked the last Islamic civil war around 680 A.D. or so.
Jay B.
And of course, most of them believe the stupidest propaganda possible in order to feel victimized by it. What I’m trying to say here is that Sherman’s March was hardly as brutal as legend and wasn’t even as brutal as the scorched Earth policy the Confederates put in place in advance of it.
I’m sure, however, that the losers in this islamic civil war will be eager to get over their loss.
MattR
@Comrade Dread: And I think Friedman’s point is that the authorities from your example are not actually anti-murder and that the killing of abortion doctors wont stop until they actually become anti-murder and do the investigations and imprisoning that you describe.
This is the paragraph before the two that John excerpted
arguingwithsignposts
Religious factional warfare =/= intranational dispute (cf., the Reformation for a more applicable analogy).
And didn’t he win a Pulitzer at one point? I guess if the world is flat, we’re all Arabs and Muslims now.
Violet
@arguingwithsignposts:
I think Friedman included Arabs because “Arabs” are dogwhistle for “scary and bad” so it’s a way of saying “those bad people need to sort themselves out” without actually saying it.
Johnny Pez
Shorter Moustache: “Remember the war between Iran and Iraq? Good times, eh?”
mistersnrub
It astounds me that people consider this man a “public intellectual.” If this is what constitutes a public intellectual in our society, well, we’ve had a good run.
DougJ
That was one weird ass column.
I say, when you’re in a civil war, stop shooting, when you’re in three, bring a lot of ammo.
bayville
Is this buffoon calling for a War against bloggers with Arab-sounding surnames? Gawd, he’s soooo serious.
MattR
@arguingwithsignposts: Sadly, I don’t think the average NY Times reader can handle all that detail. For better or worse, the problem of fundamental Islam as it relates to American interests is focused on the Middle East.
@Violet: I think he is saying that only people in the region can fix the problem. I think he purposely wanted to include the non-Muslims who live there, but there really is no term that sums up the entire group is there? Even Middle Easterners is not really sufficient. I just think Arabs and Muslims was his shorthand way of saying everyone who lives there.
Little Dreamer
@General Winfield Stuck:
Actually, oil is just the tool we use to throw our power around because we’re white and they’re not! It’s embarrassing that I come from a race of people who seem to think only they know how to make the rules. I agree that the volatility comes from the meddling of the west though.
Garrigus Carraig
Well, it’s not Friedman’s fault. Everyone is aware of what he does, & if someone wants to pay him, who is he to refuse? These are difficult times; even the wealthy feel skittish.
Friedman can write columns asserting just about anything, & he won’t be fired. There is a reason that Punch keeps him on. Is it because he knows something scandalous about Punch? Is it because the paper’s Middle East agenda (?) is more easily communicated when set next to falsehoods & inanities? We’ll probably never know. But Friedman — glib, insufficiently intelligent, lazy, & buffoonish — is exactly what the Times wants to print. Suck on that.
Lev
Tom Friedman is to journalism what Bruce Vilanch is to comedy.
Little Dreamer
@Derelict:
Well, I guess their big problem is with Macedonia then, huh?
BombIranForChrist
You have to jihad a few eggs to make an omelet.
New Yorker
Yes. What Friedman might be trying (and failing) to say is that, just as it took centuries of destructive war for Christianity to lose its fanatical zeal and turn into a matter of personal preference in Europe, it might take the same to rid Islam of its fanaticism.
Of course, the religious wars of Europe took over a century to end and cost hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lives even without the nuclear weapons that the Islamic war might involve, so wishing for such a thing isn’t exactly the brightest move on Tommy’s part.
El Cid
Maybe his complaint is that there haven’t been enough civil wars in Muslim societies?
arguingwithsignposts
@MattR:
But the region he’s talking about is in Asia, not the Arabian Peninsula or northern Africa. So he’s lumping these people together under the term “Arab” that would probably be highly offensive to someone in Turkey, much less AfPak. They’re not even members of the Arab League.
Geography FAIL. As to the average reader of the NYTimes, it should be Friedman’s responsibility to explain, not lump distinct geographic and cultural regions together for the convenience of American stupidity.
Notorious P.A.T.
I love how people say that Muslims have to stop the extremists in their midst. As if here in America, Christians have been able to stop the extremists in their midst.
Ann B. Nonymous
@Chad S: People say that the Muslim world needs a Reformation — it was one of Brad DeLong’s favorite catchphrases for a while — but they forget what the actual Reformation was like.
And really, the Muslim world has had one of those already. Would anyone today feel comfortable if Oliver Cromwell was still around and trying to get the atomic bomb?
Why can’t people — pundits and commenters alike — say they’d like these nations to become liberal democracies that share common goals with us? Not sexy enough? Not hard-minded enough? Doesn’t satisfy the urge for playing Risk with real humans? Sometimes I wonder.
Warren Terra
Spencer Ackerman had a good post saying “Jihad” is by definition a good thing in Islam, and so we lose effectiveness by rhetorically attacking “Jihadis”: we should condemn atrocities, and terrorism.
Epicurus
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
These words will soon be engraved on the Capitol and the White House. Nonetheless, I was just checking out 538, and Silver makes some interesting points, specifically on the financial reform bill. Dunno, it’s not looking too good right now, but we may have to proceed more incrementally. I do agree that blowing it up and starting over would be disastrous, but I can’t say that the alternative will be much better.
Lev
@Notorious P.A.T.: Yeah, it’s always fun when hawks start talking about how we never hear about the moderate Muslims. Cause they definitely want to spend the rest of their lives explaining themselves to Michelle Malkin. I’m sure she would have no problem making a statement to the people of Turkey disowning every Christianist nut that beats up an Muslim for the rest of time.
jl
And also. How many times has this column been written already, by Friedman or someone else?
I have given Friedman some slack because I attributed his punchiness-drunk flip language to a stupid crutch he uses to be ‘hep’. But now I wonder. “Civil war”? Why use that phrase?
I would say it is another flip Friedmanism used in sad and deluded attempt to seem ‘with it’ and ‘happening’ and get some reader’s attention. See, this guy imagines himself a deep thinker, operating in realms far too complex for the lower order of ordinary person who cannot divine the word on diverse streets worldwide from taxi drivers while being wafted from the airport to the luxe hotel. So, in addition to using the ‘hepcat’ language, he also has to simplify his deep thoughts into pungent formulas. Get it?
But then his only concrete example seems to be the American Civil War, which, by the way did not lead to inter-regional, inter-racial, and inter-class understanding in 1865.
Yeah, that is just what the Islamic world, and we, and anybody else you can think of needs, a fricken civil war between two factions in the Islamic world. I guess it is a given that his idea of the ‘good guys’ will win. I guess everything will calm down and be all unicorns and rainbows in Fairy Tale Happy Meadow Rainbow Land when one side ‘Throws them against the wall’ and ‘Suck on This’.
Hard to know what to say other than it is hideous senseless drivel.
Roger Moore
History fail. We may have defeated the individuals, leaders, and institutions that propagated the ideas, but we didn’t do jack shit about the ideas themselves. A generation after the Civil War, the same individuals- and many of the same leaders- were creating a whole new batch of institutions to propagate and enforce the same racist beliefs. That’s why the descendants of slaves were denied basic civil rights more than a century after the Civil War was over, and haven’t achieved full equality even today.
Violet
@MattR:
Everyone who lives WHERE? In Arab countries? I’m sure the militant Pakistanis will be relieved to hear that Thomas Friedman doesn’t consider them anything to worry about.
@arguingwithsignposts: You are spot on. MattR, just read arguingwithsignposts on the geography issue.
Friedman is either being deliberately stupid about geography, or there’s some reason he’s singling out Arabs. I think it’s the Arabs=bad guys in movies theory that’s motivating him here.
jl
I guess it would have been helpful, during ‘the troubles’ to ask the Irish to have a civil war, and sit around and judge Irish organizations and people all over here and there on how often, and thoroughly they denounced, renounced rejected and reviled the IRA.
And then when asked what was meant by civil war, give an example that left 600K soldiers and more civilians dead in four years.
Yep, we should have done that. And we should have done it in a very flip and knowing way. Would have fixed things up much quicker. Where was Tom Fman then?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I am speechless. I don’t know a word for this kind of stupidity.
kuvasz
friedman really is such a dumb son of a bitch. The issue is not akin to a civil war but a Reformation of Islam akin to what Europe underwent with the split in Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until there is a rejection of Islamic mysticism and a return to the rational strain of Islam that got wiped out after the eleventh century the religion will continue to breed fanatics.
arguingwithsignposts
@Roger Moore:
This. Too.
So we have history FAIL and geography FAIL in the span of two paragraphs. When will we get the rest of the curriculum FAIL? BoB?
Little Dreamer
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Christians ARE the extremists in their (our) midst!
D-Chance.
Heck, we may need another civil war in THIS country before long with the way we’re fracturing…
In the mean time, I’m going to click over and look for my Arab Princess.
Annie
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Exactly. Maybe we should have our own “civil war” against extremism and start with those members of “The Family” in Congress. Does Uganda come to anyone’s mind????
Zuzu's Petals
As poorly written and poorly argued as Friedman’s piece is, he’s certainly not alone in this concept:
Reza Aslan, “The War for Islam.”
Faux News
I’ll give you two words: Green Balloons!
Use the safe word and the mustache will go away. (I hope).
Jacquelyn
First, which country is “Islam”?
Second, didn’t the Catholics face similar circumstances around divorce? I thought that’s where the Anglican Church came from, and the “only” bloodshed was as a result of being Mrs. Henry.
Mark
Tom Friedman phones it in like Winnie the Pooh did in the “Heffalump Movie”
Brett
Although Friedman delivers it in his usual incompetent style, I can sort of see a point in the “civil war” part of what he’s saying (although he’s saying it for the wrong reasons). If you look at the history of Europe, one of the reasons why we don’t really have “Christian universalism” as a political force in the way that “Muslim universalism” seems to have it (the whole “muslim lands are under attack!” and such mentality) is because of the Thirty Years War.
That war basically broke the back of any christian universalist claim by a church (aka the Catholic Church) to have superceding authority over the states that held its faith, via the Treaty of Westphalia. But Islam has never had anything like that.
Batocchio
Ouch, that’s oversimplified, triumphalist drivel from the mustache.
Isn’t Tommy basically just saying he wants to outsource his prized bombings? After all, Arabs, Muslims and Persians in the Middle East are all the same to him, and imperialists with manhood issues need their bombings. If the right sort of scary brown people bomb the wrong sort of scary brown people somewhere over there – they might even earn Tommy’s love.
tootiredoftheright
@Comrade Dread:
Actually the plan was to pay the slave owners the money the slaves were worth if the slaves were let go then paid living wages to work on the plantations.
The newspapers/slave owners presented it as such that the Northern states wanted the slaves let go without compensation. So yeah the state right was not to have the federal gov’t take away with the slaves without compensation. Of course that wasn’t the truth.
Lincoln wanted a gradual freeing so the freed slaves could be educated and assimilated into society and not have economic disturbances on the Southern economy.
tootiredoftheright
@Brett:
” is because of the Thirty Years War.
”
Well having several regions have two-thirds of their pop wiped out, the Inquistions (there was more then one), Reformation etc all contributed as did the Black Death to well Religion losing a lot of overt political power in Europe.
Stefan
We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.
History fail. I mean, what? We didn’t defeat the South with ferocity (though perhaps we should have). We didn’t burn down their cities, kill all their men and enslave their women, and when the war was over we didn’t hang Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and all the Confederate Cabinet and generals.
Back here in reality, there was a brief period of occupation, and then we basically withdrew troops from the South and let them get back to the business of oppressing and degrading the blacks, instituting Jim Crow, hanging the Confederate battle flag from their public buildings, putting up statues to traitors like Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, and generally acting like all-around racists for another hundred years, and then we handed over key posts like President, Vice President, Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader to Southerners.
I mean seriously, did the fool Friedman really we defeated the “ideas” of racism” and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them” with the Civil War? Yeah, we defeated them so well that a hundred years after the war black men and women still weren’t allowed to drink from the same water fountain as whites….
The only reason that “some of their [Confederate] offspring” still have not forgiven the North is because those Southerners are basically whiny, vindictive, petty bad losers who resent the fact that they rightfully got their asses kicked for committing treason in defense of slavery…..
Brett
But the result of the Thirty Years’ War was particularly crucial – it allowed rulers to choose the religion of their states, which broke the claim of, say, the Catholic Church, that it has some superceding religious and political authority over the temporal rulers. There’s a reason why the Treaty of Westphalia is generally considered the beginning of the rise of the nation-state.
Ajay
Tom Friedman Checks into Five Star Hotel, Gets Idea for New Book
http://eggplantpost.com/2009/12/16/tom-friedman-checks-into-five-star-hotel-gets-idea-for-new-book/