🖊️ When Arsonists Sell Fire Extinguishers: Thomas Friedman’s Gospel of Bombs, Betrayals, and Blinding Hypocrisy
By Malik Mukhtar | www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
Once again, Thomas Friedman—the well-compensated oracle of Western liberal imperialism—is here to teach us morality from the smoking crater of his own past delusions. The man who cheered on the invasion of Iraq like a halftime show, who sold the American public a lie with polished metaphors and breathless optimism, now graces our screens to tell us what’s really going on in the Middle East and beyond.
Spoiler alert: it’s the same old tale—autocracies vs. democracies, darkness vs. light, the evil “resisters” vs. the righteous “inclusionists.” Friedman wants you to believe that missiles, coups, and starvation blockades are instruments of peace, while resistance to colonial occupation is terrorism. He narrates a grand global chess match with all the pomp of a messianic strategist—ignoring the trail of bones under every square.
Let’s talk about “forces of inclusion,” shall we?
According to Friedman, these include Saudi Arabia (where dissenters vanish and journalists are chopped in embassies), Israel (currently bulldozing Gaza into dust), and the United States (which just cut food programs for its own poor while financing two wars abroad). Inclusion, it seems, means getting invited to the banquet—if you agree to starve your neighbor.
What about the “resisters”? Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. Ugly actors, no doubt. But why are they resisting? Could it be the 70+ years of occupation, assassinations, sanctions, foreign invasions, and betrayals sponsored by the very countries Mr. Friedman applauds as beacons of progress?
Friedman doesn’t mention that Israel, the centerpiece of his inclusionist paradise, is presided over by a far-right coalition that sees annexation, apartheid, and open-air prisons not as moral failings, but as divine right. He offers a faint, performative slap on Netanyahu’s wrist—but still manages to sandwich it between high praise for Israel’s military brilliance and Trump’s muscular diplomacy.
This isn’t journalism. It’s an intellectual exorcism designed to cleanse Western guilt while absolving the architects of chaos.
“We must resist Trump’s autocratic project,” he says, “as if he weren’t doing great work against Iran.”
Translation: authoritarianism is bad—unless it comes with a side of strategic bombing.
Friedman offers us a Hallmark version of history: Syria was ruined by Iran, not by years of U.S.-backed regime change operations and Israeli airstrikes. Iraq failed because of Iran—not because we invaded it under false pretenses (which Friedman famously endorsed). And somehow, in this magical fable, the millions dead, displaced, or starved are simply collateral in a glorious war for "inclusion."
Where are the Gazan children in Friedman’s sermon? Where are the starving mothers, the amputated fathers, the mass graves of aid workers? Oh, right—they’re casualties of resistance, not integration. Apparently, some lives are too inconvenient to include.
He praises MBS for reforming Islam—as if freedom can be autocratically engineered with shopping malls and repression. He dreams of a “new Middle East” led by billionaires, built atop rubble, and powered by normalization deals signed in the shadows of massacres.
Friedman’s column ends with a flourish—advocating a conditional two-state solution that requires Palestinians to accept more occupation, fewer rights, and the generous guardianship of Arab armies handpicked by Washington.
He doesn’t ask: What do the Palestinians want?
Because that, dear reader, is the one question inclusionists never include.
In summary?
Thomas Friedman has returned to the scene of the crime—not to apologize, but to write the next script.
He was wrong about Iraq. He’s blind about Gaza. And he’s still selling the same imperial fantasy: that bombs bring peace, that occupiers want coexistence, and that empires can be benevolent.
But you don’t build a just world by preaching democracy from the cockpit of a drone.
You don’t birth “inclusion” on the back of a bulldozer.
And you don’t get to call yourself a journalist while spinning genocide into geopolitics.
📌 Read more at www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
✍️ Let history remember not who justified the wars—but who dared to write against them.
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