Israel Matzav

Thomas Friedman denies calling the Muslim Brotherhood 'legitimate, authentic and progressive'

You will recall that I reported the other day that New York Times columnist Tom Friedman had called the Muslim Brotherhood 'legitimate, authentic and progressive.' In a response to my friend Yisrael Medad's JPost blog, Friedman claims that an Egyptian reporter 'mangled' what he said.

The quote attributed to me by the Egyptian daily is completely mangled. I was asked by an audience member to give my assessment of the liberal's performance in the Egyptian election. What I actually said, which the reporter, clearly not an English speaker, did not get, was that it was no surprise that the Muslim Brotherhood did so well in this first election because for the last 30 years Mubarak had cleared out all the political space between himself and the Brotherhood so that he was able to come to Washington and say to successive U.S. Presidents that "It is either me or them.'' I said that what the Egyptian elections produced, for the first time, were legitimate, authentic, liberal, secular, nationalist, progressive alternatives to the Muslim Brotherhood and now the Brotherhood would have to compete with such alternatives -- for the first time. I then said, given the fact that the liberals had only four months to organize their parties and that the Brotherhood had been in politics for 83 years, that I thought the liberals had done amazingly well. By the way, there were many cameras filming all of this, so it is easy enough to verify.

I would also note that this is a point I have made many times before in my writings -- in precisely those words -- that what was missing in Arab politics was a legitimate, progressive alternative to both the official parties and the Islamists. I would also note that in my previous NYT column from I Cairo, I wrote: "...the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve.''

Read the whole thing.

I wonder how many Thomas Friedman's there are in the Manhattan phone book....

I didn't find any video yet (if you do, drop me an email), but I did find this from the Christian Science Monitor.

Reading Al Ahram's and The Daily News Egypt's accounts of the event, I found three apparent errors of fact made by the columnist.

1. Partially explaining the success of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party in recent Egyptian parliamentary elections, Mr. Friedman said: "The Muslim Brotherhood is legitimate, authentic, progressive alternative. Only faced by the four-month old liberals, they had to win." Al Ahram's English edition quoted him as saying Egypt's "liberal parties ... are only four months old."

Four-month-old liberals? Friedman's point was that the Brotherhood has been around for over 80 years, and was therefore better prepared than secular opponents for Egypt's fairest elections in at least a generation. But this doesn't track the actual history.

While many new parties have sprung up since the Tahrir protests last year, a number of Egyptian liberal parties have been around as long or longer than the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party. The Wafd Party, which appears to have come in third in the election, was founded in the early 20th century, and was reformed in the early 70s. The Tagammu Party, another secular group with socialist roots, also ran in the recent elections and was formed in the 70s.

Hmmm.

Labels: Muslim Brotherhood, Tom Friedman, Yisrael Medad

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:30 PM