Thomas Friedman Comes Out Swinging In His Columns on The Middle East
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 6, 2001; Page C01
With his pair of Pulitzers, two bestsellers and a prime patch of New York Times real estate, Thomas Friedman hasn't exactly been lacking in the exposure department.
But for a foreign affairs columnist who's spent years writing about Middle East violence, Osama bin Laden and the failure of autocratic Arab regimes to adapt to modern society, the last couple of months have dramatically boosted his market value.
He's been on "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "Good Morning America," "Charlie Rose" and David Letterman, as well as a slew of Arab TV broadcasts. The Egyptian ambassador asked him to meet with a visiting delegation. People stop him on the street and thank him. His online chat room got so overloaded that the Times had to shut it down.
"My boutique was foreign policy," says Friedman, 48. "It wasn't the big story. It wasn't Bloomingdale's; it was a nice little Upper East Side shop that you hope sold quality merchandise. With this story, you could become Nordstrom's."
As his global reach increases, so does his legion of detractors, especially in the Arab world. "Your media is irresponsible also," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told Newsweek earlier this year. "What about Tom Friedman's very bad articles?"
Says Friedman: "In the Middle East, everyone wants to own you. If they can't own you, they want to destroy you. There's no middle ground."
The Bethesda resident's secret is that he doesn't sit in his office thinking great thoughts. He hits the road -- recent stops included Pakistan, India, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- chatting up both senior officials and what he calls mid-level "munchkins."
The Internet has made him inescapable. After filing a column in Qatar, Friedman was having breakfast with an American press aide when her cell phone rang. It was the vice president of Qatar University, who had read his column online and wanted to track him down. The press aide handed Friedman the phone.
Friedman is drawing attention not just for his mastery of the Middle East but also for his punch-in-the-nose prose, blaming U.S. allies in the Arab world for fostering terrorism even as their rulers smile toward America. In fact, he's turned downright hawkish. "Shame on me if you aren't mixing it up," he says. "You want people to argue about your ideas. Any moron can write in a way that can provoke people."
Here's a typical Friedman column: "What these Arab regimes still don't get is that Sept. 11 has exposed their game. They think America is on trial now, but in fact it is stale regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which produced the hijackers, that are on trial. Will they continue to let Islam be hijacked by anti-modernists, who will guarantee that the Arab world falls further behind? Will they continue to blame others? Or will they look in the mirror, take on intolerance and open their societies to a different future?"
Here's Friedman quoting an Egyptian newspaper editor who "basically accuses the U.S. of dropping poison food on Afghans according to unspecified 'reports.' So is it any wonder that people on the Egyptian street hate us? This is the game that produced bin Ladenism: Arab regimes fail to build a real future for their people. . . . The regimes crush the violent Muslim protesters, but to avoid being accused of being anti-Muslim the regimes give money and free rein to their most hard-line, but nonviolent, Muslim clerics, while also redirecting their publics' anger onto America through their press. Result: America ends up being hated and Islam gets handed over to the most anti-modern forces. Have a nice day."
He has been doing this for much of his professional life, and it shows. In June, Friedman penned an imaginary letter from bin Laden after reports of cell phone threats prompted U.S. forces to pull out of Yemen, Bahrain and Jordan:
"Allahu Akbar! God is Great! This is a superpower? The Americans turned tail as soon as they picked up a few threats from us. The U.S. press barely reported it; the White House press didn't even ask the president about it. . . . They have no military answer for our threat."
The reaction: zilch.
"I tried to shake the tree," Friedman says, "but you couldn't get through Gary Condit."
Fury From Both Sides
The blistering column arrived from Cairo, featuring a caricature of Friedman with a long serpent's tongue that slithered down the page.
"There aren't enough hours in the day to send you everything written about you in the Egyptian press," Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar said after mailing him the piece. Friedman believes the "blowback" stems from his criticism of such regimes as backward rather than just anti-Israel.
In more than two decades as a foreign policy writer, Tom Friedman has concentrated on two intractable issues that arouse fierce, almost tribal passions. One is the maddening psychology of the endless battle between Israel and the Palestinians, chronicled in his 1989 book "From Beirut to Jerusalem," which sold close to a million copies. (Just yesterday he compared the Palestinians to bin Laden, saying their priority "is to kill Jews and get revenge for Israel's assassination of a Hamas leader whose only claim to fame was organizing previous suicide bombings.")
The other is the sometimes-violent debate over globalization, and Friedman's belief that the McDonaldization of the world can boost living standards and ultimately trump ancient Middle East hatreds -- the foundation of his 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree."
In the post-Sept. 11 climate, both books are back on the Times bestseller list.
Friedman, who is Jewish, has denounced "the lunacy of 7,000 Israeli colonial settlers living in the middle of a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." Little wonder, then, that a Jerusalem Post columnist once called him a "propagandist for the Palestinian cause."
But to the Saudi press, says Friedman, "I'm a Zionist stooge. Of course, I wasn't a Zionist stooge when I reported on the massacre at Sabra and Shatila [in Lebanon], or when I called for a Palestinian state next to a Jewish state when we didn't even have relations with the PLO."
Friedman's domestic critics are no less fierce. Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, disdains Friedman for "a rather naive American emphasis on economics. He doesn't understand the dynamics of the Middle East, the enthusiasm for Saddam, Palestinian violence. These are mysterious from his point of view." Yet even Pipes calls Friedman "probably the single most influential interpreter of the Middle East."
Lori Wallach, a Ralph Nader acolyte who was involved in protests at the Seattle trade talks in 1999, told Foreign Policy magazine of Friedman: "I must have 40 e-mails saved of you-have-to-laugh-out-loud, almost-wet-your-pants things that he's said, that are just so ignorant and out of touch with political reality."
Most editors would disagree. The Baltimore Sun started running Friedman's column last summer and has since increased its frequency. "I just think he's too important to ignore," says Richard Gross, the Sun's op-ed editor. "If he doesn't win a Pulitzer, I'll be very surprised."
Says Michael Mandelbaum, a friend who teaches at Johns Hopkins's School for Advanced International Studies (and has been quoted by Friedman more than 50 times): "He will go to a Brazilian rain forest, or an AOL facility in the Philippines, or an Internet cafe in the Persian Gulf, and report and interpret what's happening. That's one of his great strengths as a columnist."
One California reader e-mailed him: "I could not imagine what I would have done had it not been for the biweekly treasure of your articles to guide me through this terrible time."
All this is enough to make a journalist a bit full of himself, as Friedman occasionally is. But it's a commentary on the American media that Friedman and The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland (also a two-time Pulitzer winner) are the only full-time foreign affairs columnists on major newspapers. The old conventional wisdom was that Americans didn't much care about the rest of the world. Now, in the post-9/11 environment, the talk shows can't get enough of Friedman.
"Tom is smart, knowledgeable, pithy and conversational all at once," says "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert. "Nobody understands the world the way he does. When he comes to the table, he brings this enormous wealth not only of reporting and anecdotes, but of his own life experience. He's constantly ahead of the curve."
But Friedman turns down more television invitations than he accepts. "I don't want to be a talking head," he told Russert. "I don't want to be a sound bite."
Links to His Past
We may be immersed in World War III, as Friedman calls it, but he's still hitting golf balls.
"It is said that America will never be quite the same after Sept. 11," Friedman writes in Golf Digest, where he is a contributing editor. "Golf is just a game. But since it is our game, part of what gives joy in our lives, there is no shame in asking where golf fits into all this. . . . Golf's real contribution is the one it can make to healing."
Friedman played golf for his suburban Minneapolis high school. He caddied for Chi Chi Rodriguez in the 1970 U.S. Open. A few years back, he hit the links with President Clinton.
It was also on the golf course that Friedman's father, an executive of a ball bearing manufacturer, died of a heart attack when Tom was 19.
"That sealed the deal," says Ken Greer, founder of a Minneapolis advertising agency, who has been close to Friedman since high school. "He developed an incredible sense of self. It actually gave him strength and fortitude -- because you never know when something might happen to you. He knew we all hang by a very thin thread."
Before that, says Greer, Friedman was a wisecracking kid who wrote for the high school paper about kissing in the halls. "He was a goofball. He was, almost to the point of obsession, involved in learning about the Kennedy assassination. He postulated his own theories. It became part of his persona."
Friedman transferred his obsession to the Middle East while spending three summers in Israel during high school, working on a kibbutz. After graduating from Brandeis University, he earned a master's in Middle East studies at Oxford (his mother sold her house and followed him to Britain). With help from his girlfriend (and future wife), Ann, whose family knew the editor of the Des Moines Register, Friedman sold the paper a few op-ed pieces.
When she returned to America,they wrote every other day for two years. "Most people would get a bundle of love letters," says Ann Friedman, a fifth-grade teacher and National Symphony Orchestra official who still helps edit, and occasionally tone down, his columns. "Mine were all his latest Middle East peace proposals. . . . I was worried I wasn't sufficiently interested in the Middle East for him to marry me."
Friedman soon landed a $200-a-week job with United Press International, which sent him to Beirut. "I was scared out of my mind," Friedman says.
With good reason. In 1983, two years after Friedman left UPI for the Times, the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut was bombed -- six blocks from where he lived. It was an up-close-and-personal introduction to terrorism.
Friedman's emotion energized his writing. A week after the massacres in Lebanon, he banged his fist and shouted to Israeli commander Amir Drori: "How could you do this? How could you not see? How could you not know?" The next morning, he later recalled, "I buried Amir Drori on the front page of the New York Times, and along with him every illusion I ever held about the Jewish state."
Strong stuff for a working scribe. "I've always been pretty opinionated, even as a reporter," Friedman admits. In 1988, he shouted upstairs to his wife after getting word that he had won a Pulitzer.
"What for, editorial writing?" she shot back.
Friedman got the coveted column in 1995 after stints covering the White House and international economics. Veteran Times man Tom Wicker sent him a postcard: "Don't be afraid to be wrong, otherwise you will never be right."
Friedman is usually liberal and was sharply critical of George W. Bush during the campaign, accusing him of "affable ignorance" and "deeply, deeply shallow" views on foreign affairs. But he's been a big booster of the president since the September attacks, urging people to "give war a chance" during the weeks when little progress was being made in Afghanistan.
The White House quickly made national security adviser Condoleezza Rice available for a half-hour chat when Friedman asked for her. "We ignore him at our peril," a White House official says. "He's a very thoughtful guy with more than a dash of Tabasco. Sometimes what he writes is important and sometimes it's drivel. But his audience is really important."
Not every Friedman column is about foreign policy. Not long ago, the Middle East maven waxed poetic about Eastern Middle School, the Silver Spring school attended by one of his two teenage daughters. There were "40 different nationalities" there, he observed, and a stirring rendition of "God Bless America" on parent-teacher night.
Corny? You bet. But Friedman is a true-blue Minnesota man, a Vikings football fan, imbued with cornfed American values and a champion of the sort of public schools he attended.
He once gave his daughters a lecture that it's hard to imagine most East Coast journalists delivering: "You can have any view, left, right or center. You can come home with someone black, white or purple. But you will never come in this house and not love your country."
A Different Talk Show
Friedman did Letterman Friday night.
He wasn't funny.
He wasn't supposed to be.
In fact, their discussion went on so long that comedian Eddie Brill got bumped.
The audience started cheering when Friedman said the fighting should continue "until bin Laden is brought back dead or dead."
David Letterman "just wanted to have a serious discussion about oil, Afghanistan, why they hate us," Friedman says. "It was a real eye-opener in terms of popular culture hungering for a serious discussion about foreign policy."
The war may have catapulted Friedman to late-night fame, but he says he's just doing what he always does -- with one crucial distinction.
"I've just been reacting to this story in a very gut way," he says. "I'm writing out of a real sense of anger."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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