Freud and the Middle East
NOV. 11, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/freud-and-the-middle-east.html?comments#permid=13311111
"What politicians here tell you in private is usually irrelevant. What matters most, ... is what they say in public in their own language to their own people."
Coming from a Pulitzer Prize winning "journalist" this "realization" comes frighteningly late. Going back through Mr. Friedman's commentary on the Middle East, his analysis often seems simplistic, as in his repeated statements that social media/twitter would be the boon of a new Arabic liberal/democratic awakening, and gullible, as in his frequent exhortations that the "solutions" were those he had just heard in his latest interview (in English) with a Middle East "personality", political or not - remember his commentary on the idea that the problem/solution in the Middle East had its roots entirely in ecology and access to water.
As a complete amateur (albeit, fairly well read), I have been hammering away in my comments, that the problems in the Middle East are at their root a centuries old religious war, not unlike the long battle beween Catholics and Protestants in Europe. It would have been helpful if Mr. Friedman had accepted this reality (very well described in this piece) before he acted as a cheerleader for the brainless US intervention in Iraq, where we completely ignored this underlying religious conflict in the Middle East, and in our pathetically simplistic way (fed by the unique situation of WW II) assumed that we would be welcomed as "liberators".
We poked a stick into a hornets nest and created ISIS.
Coming from a Pulitzer Prize winning "journalist" this "realization" comes frighteningly late. Going back through Mr. Friedman's commentary on the Middle East, his analysis often seems simplistic, as in his repeated statements that social media/twitter would be the boon of a new Arabic liberal/democratic awakening, and gullible, as in his frequent exhortations that the "solutions" were those he had just heard in his latest interview (in English) with a Middle East "personality", political or not - remember his commentary on the idea that the problem/solution in the Middle East had its roots entirely in ecology and access to water.
As a complete amateur (albeit, fairly well read), I have been hammering away in my comments, that the problems in the Middle East are at their root a centuries old religious war, not unlike the long battle beween Catholics and Protestants in Europe. It would have been helpful if Mr. Friedman had accepted this reality (very well described in this piece) before he acted as a cheerleader for the brainless US intervention in Iraq, where we completely ignored this underlying religious conflict in the Middle East, and in our pathetically simplistic way (fed by the unique situation of WW II) assumed that we would be welcomed as "liberators".
We poked a stick into a hornets nest and created ISIS.
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