Thomas Friedman Takes a Beating

The ‘Stache That Wouldn’t Die marches ever onward.

Today on the radio machine I heard the most remarkable thing. I heard a gentleman named Mr. Laith Saud (who lectures on Islamic world studies at DePaul University) toss Jerome McDonnell (the host of the Worldview program on our local NPR affiliate) a live grenade when, instead of answering Mr. McDonnell's question straightaway, (which went something like this...)

McDonnell: There is an article in the New York Times today by Thomas Friedman wherein the Mighty Mustache of Understanding purports to assay the entire history of uprisings in the Middle East...yadda yadda yadda...sorta rank their probability of success by culture, origins, what "kinds of people" they are, etc, etc... tribes with flags...acting out in countries that had been created by western map makers. What do you make of the reasons for success for some of these uprisings?

Mr. Saud instead chose to pause and then preface his answer with the following:

First, I need to say something that I don't often do, nor would I often do...and that is, OK, I'm somebody who was born in the Arab world. I'm somebody who studies this region. It's part of my professional work. Thomas Friedman has been off the ball when it comes to talking about the Arab world for going on a decade. He was a vociferous advocate of the invasion of Iraq. He pontificated as to what that would result in. And there has been absolutely no accountability on the part of the marketplace or professional journalists, academics, intellectuals or scholars to call out not only him, but other Neoliberals who have enjoined (in?) theory with no applicability to reality. OK.

This is a common theme that we see smongst journalists who talk about the Arab world. That its really a collection of artificial states and thye use this as a predicate to advocate policy.

The truth of the matter is that A) The Arab world consists of states that are far more authentic than we often claim, B) There are some artificial states in the Arab world, and many of these states are often off the register of this conversation because they tend to be allies of ours, C) these states have existed since the 1920s so I think to continue to beat the hum-drum of them being artificial states is really not doing us any good. Yet its a convenient, cute argument; its one of these Fried-isms that Thomas Friedman likes to come up with. But they're not doing anything in terms of informing us or illuminating the narrative or illuminating the facts on the ground.

Bless you, Mr. Saud. Not that Thomas Friedman will know or care that someone with credentials and access to a microphone sawed his dick off and fed it to the dogs or anything, but it positively made my day.

What is equally interesting in almost exactly the opposite way is the fact that between the time I heard the broadcast live on the air, and the time I checked with the WBEZ website to listen to the above exchange one more time so as to transcribe Mr. Saud's world accurately, someone at WBEZ excised a few of Mr. Saud's more lacerating comments as well as the name of at least one other person who Mr. Saud included in a more generalized indictment of the punditocracy and which WBEZ also censored on the taped version.

Of course this may have just been standard practice; something routinely done for the sake of time (After all, Mr. Saud's segment was followed by a long story about the awesomeness of cricket.)

Or maybe when your management has become so timorous that the future your funding can be used as a pinata by a lying goon like Andrew Breitbart, you learn to double down on minding your P's and Q's, even if that means partially-censoring some uncomfortably honest Q-and-A's.