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
What happened at Deir Yassin?
Saturday is Deir Yassin day, a day that commemorates a massacre that never was.
It's much harder to prove that there was no massacre at Deir Yassin than it would be today. Today, you'd have drones flying overhead photographing the battle to prove that your troops did not commit a massacre. But like Jenin 50 years later, there was no massacre at Deir Yassin (which is known today as Har Nof). It was all an Arab lie - one of the first instances of
Pallywood.
The attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (today, the Har Nof neighborhood) was not, as claimed, a "massacre" nor was it a premeditated killing. As we now know from Arab sources and other independent research, (see Bregman, Ahron & El-Tahri, Jihan, "The Fifty Years War, Israel and the Arabs," Penguin Books, BBC Books, London, 1998. pp. 27-34 and Klein, Morton A., “Deir Yassin History of a Lie, ZOA, NY 2005) the number of dead at the village was between 93 and 110, at the most. All of them were killed during the course of the battle, in house-to-house fighting. There were no mutilations or atrocities caused to the corpses as per testimony from the villagers themselves. The attacking combined force of Irgun and Lehi units brought with them a loudspeaker to the village entrance to warn the inhabitants. They also left an escape route open, which led to Ein Karem, so as not to have to harm the inhabitants unnecessarily and hundreds took advantage of this Jewish act of kindness in battle. All these preparations and actions belie any intent of a massacre.
We should recall that, for example, when Hulda was attacked in 1929, Efraim Chisik, brother of Devora Chisik who was killed nine years earlier at Tel Chai, after being shot dead by Arabs was then set alight and his body burned. The British soldiers who saved the survivors did not permit them to take with them his body which was recovered several days later, horribly mutilated as were the bodies of the famous 35 of Gush Etzion who were killed in January 1948.
The fighters were instructed before the attack specifically not to harm unarmed civilians. The survivors were provided transportation to the Old City of Jerusalem and no physical injury was done to them after the surrender. True, the battle itself was not conducted with the utmost professionalism. The underground combatants were not fully trained in urban warfare of this type. The house-to-house character of the fighting, the shooting from within the homes and the lack of knowledge of who was in the houses, all led to the use of dynamite rather indiscriminately causing thus many of the deaths. The portrayal in another recent docudrama, “The Promised Land” shown on Britain's’ Channel Four, is so ludicrous as to be a stain on film professionalism. The battle at the village, part of the “Nahshon” campaign to relieve Jerusalem of the siege the Arabs were applying to the city by blocking the main highway, was approved by the Hagana commander. Deir Yassin provided a base for the Arab attacks on the Castel and the Histadrut Davar newspaper issue of April 4, 1948, contained a report that the previous Friday night, shots from snipers had been fired from Deir Yassin towards Bet Hakerem and Bayit VeGan Jewish neighborhoods (see here). A local Palmach unit provided mortar support fire at one point. Claims of rape, butchering of bodies and other atrocities is simply not true.
The village, portrayed as a quiet and uninvolved village in the fighting, is also misleading. In the first instance, Iraqi soldiers and other Arabs state irregulars had been in the village for weeks. Secondly, the villagers had been involved in the 1920 and 1929 Arab communal riots on nearby Jews and in 1938, the Hagana attacked the village in a reprisal raid after sniper fire was directed at the main Jerusalem high way. The attacking force suffered 35% casualties of 5 killed and 40 injured.
Even Benny Morris included this in his 1999 book Righteous Victims:
"The attack, on the morning of April 9, was carried out with the prior approval of, and in cooperation with, the Jerusalem command of the Haganah. Some 130 IZL [Irgun Zvai Leumi - The National Military Organization] and LHI [Lohamei 'Herut Yisrael - Freedom Fighters of Israel a.k.a. the Stern Gang] fighters took part. During the battle, Haganah machine-gunners stationed nearby supplied covering fire, and two Palmah squads [Strike force within the Haganah] in armored cars joined in the actual battle. Palmah squads also helped evacuate the wounded, and the Haganah helped the combatants with ammunition...
But what is missing from all these commemoration events and film treatments is quite a simple fact: the village’s fate was sealed when sniping from the village was directed at two Jewish neighborhoods, Beit HaKerem and Bayit V’Gan, the Friday night before its conquest. For a rigorous treatment of the events see Uri Milstein’s account, among others.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Benny Morris, Deir Yassin, Pallywood, Yisrael Medad
Winkie winks at Palin
One of the people who got to meet with Ben Smith last week is my friend
Yisrael Medad, who had some very positive thoughts about former Alaska governor
Sarah Palin.
Israelis follow American politics as closely as most Americans, and there was a great deal of curiousity when I was there last week about who is the likeliest Republican presidential nominee.
Most Israelis didn't express a strong preference on that subject -- all the leading Republicans have at least generically hawkish, pro-Israel stands -- with a sole exception: Settlers love Sarah Palin.
I heard this from a few people, but most clearly from Yisrael Medad, a Queens-born dual citizen of the the U.S. and Israel who has lived for 30 years on top of a hill in Shilo, deep in the West Bank and inside any future Palestinian state. His is one of the settlements that the Israeli government would have to dismantle -- likely as not by force -- in any future peace deal. Medad had met Mike Huckabee, who has visited and backed both settlements in the West Bank -- though the one he visited is less remote, and more likely to be swapped into Israel, than Medad's -- and controversial Jewish expansion into an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Palin, though, is Medad's favorite.
"I want to get Sarah Palin out here," he told me during an interview at his kitchen table. "She made a very good statement -- even if it was a little factually off."
Aside from a sort of general sympathy between settlers -- who see themselves as frontiersmen of sorts -- and the former Alaska governor, they've also gotten specific -- if somewhat hazy -- encouragement from Palin.
...
As Medad wrote on his blog earlier this year, "Whether she believes our communities will grow due to God or plain old Zionism, [this] is a very good base to build on. There are many other good reasons and she should be hear to see, learn and be impressed by all the factors: geopolitical, ideological, legal rights, military and more."
Well, yes, people on the Right here (and not just 'settlers') love Sarah Palin. But I could see them getting equally comfortable with Mike Huckabee or Mike Pence or Marco Rubio or even Rudy Giuliani to name a few.
Palin's attraction is that she's very outspoken about being pro-Israel (she wears it on her
sleeve lapel), that just about everything she does attracts a lot of attention, and that love her or hate her, everyone has an opinion about her. I'd love to see Palin come here - I've already been involved in one effort to bring her here.
Will Palin wink back at Winkie (Yisrael's nickname)? I hope so.
Labels: Ben Smith, Sarah Palin is a true friend of Israel, Yisrael Medad
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. 
