There are few American journalists who so transparently embody the United States’ pompous and demeaning approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples as Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times since 1995.

Prior to tormenting humanity with his biweekly opinions (such as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace), Friedman served in the 1980s as the Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem. His time in the Middle East permitted him to hone his Orientalist arrogance, which earned him the starring role in a 1989 essay by none other than Edward Said, who remarked on the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” and Friedman’s apparent conviction that “what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks”.

Of course, Friedman’s inauguration as a foreign affairs columnist gave him greater freedom to share what he, himself, thought. Over the years, these thoughts have included that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness”, that Afghanistan is the equivalent of a “special needs baby”, and that the nation of Iraq needed to “suck on this” in order to burst the “terrorism bubble” that had made itself known on 9/11 – an event Friedman nonetheless admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.

Friedman’s persistent warmongering has been facilitated by a dedicated rejection of reality and its replacement with one in which “a lot of bad stuff happens in the world without America, but not a lot of good stuff”. The fact that Friedman’s opinions align so conveniently with US foreign policy goals does much in the way of explaining how a purveyor of “comic philistinism” has soared to such prestigious heights at the national newspaper of record.

With a genocide now going down........

© Al Jazeera