Many people are unhappy about some recent pensées from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal KingdomOpens in a new tab.” Friedman explains that “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.” He informs us that Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are like caterpillars in which this wasp lays its eggs, and those eggs are the “Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.”

This is imperialistic blather straight out of the 19th century, except horribly written — imagine Rudyard Kipling after an anvil fell on his head. But the column is useful because it reconnects us to a 1982 incident that illustrates how, when it comes to the Middle East and Israel, the management of the Times has sometimes been to the right of Friedman.

The same thing is true for the Times itself. Somehow it is simultaneously the worst and best newspaper on earth. On the one hand, it runs crimes against human cognition about the insects living in the Middle East. On the other hand, it also regularly produces brilliant investigative reporting, sometimes even about IsraelOpens in a new tab. 

This complexity is extremely cold comfort for the people who are brutalized by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, it’s important to comprehend if we’re trying to understand reality — something we should want to do, no matter how difficult and frustrating it can be.

Source: Thomas Friedman and Journalism’s Red Lines on Israel–Palestine