Reporting on New York's Javed Iqbal receiving a 69-month prison sentence for "assisting Hezbollah... by providing satellite television services that included broadcasts by the party's television station, Al Manar," Peter Daniels (World Socialist Web Site, 4/27/09) mentions that the broadcast packages included "Christian evangelists as well as Hezbollah" before explaining how

the law under which Iqbal was charged had been amended by the Patriot Act after the September 11. The revised statute was used to target individuals accused of providing aid to organizations designated as terrorist by the U.S. State Department.

Iqbal's prosecution had the effect of criminalizing speech and utilized the technique of guilt by association. Law professor and civil liberties advocate David Cole pointed this out at the time.

"Mr. Iqbal is being penalized for doing nothing more than facilitating speech, and is being punished not because the speech itself is harmful, but because it is associated with Hezbollah," Cole said.

All of this despite the fact that "the original legislation had been amended in 1988 to include an exemption for news content."

Asserting that "one positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions," Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald (3/9/09, ad-viewing required) cites "the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen" as evidence of "a substantial--and very positive--change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel":

Two weeks ago, Cohen--writing from Iran--mocked the war-seeking cartoon caricature of Iran as The New Nazi Germany craving a Second Holocaust. To do so, Cohen reported on the relatively free and content Iranian Jewish community (25,000 strong). When that column prompted all sorts of predictable attacks on Cohen from the standard cast of Israel-centric thought enforcers (Jeffrey Goldberg, National Review, right-wing blogs, etc. etc.), Cohen wrote a second column breezily dismissing those smears and then bolstering his arguments further by pointing out that "significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist" in Iran; that "Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries"; and that "hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve" given the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman in Benjamin Netanyahu's new Israeli government.

Today, Cohen returns with his most audacious column yet: Noting the trend in Britain and elsewhere to begin treating Hezbollah and Hamas as what they are--namely, "organizations [that are] now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible," rather than pure "terrorist organizations" that must be shunned--Cohen urges the Obama administration to follow this trend.

Not prone to rose-tinted views, Greenwald reminds us that "in the very recent past, not even our Constitution's First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel's enemies," writing that "the U.S. government has made it illegal merely to broadcast Hezbollah television stations and has even devoted its resources to criminally prosecuting and imprisoning satellite providers merely for including Hezbollah's Al Manar channel in their cable package."

Now if only the Times didn't feel compelled to "balance" such sensible views with outright calls for terrorism by Israeli forces. See the FAIR Action Alert: "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as 'Education'" (1/14/09)

Posting his letter to the New York Times on FAIR Blog, FAIR activist bpb points out that not only is Thomas Friedman claiming that terrorism works, he's making up evidence to claim that terrorism works:

There is no evidence for Thomas Friedman's contention that after Israel's 2006 war with Hizballah, "Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: 'What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?'" In fact, in the month following the war, a public opinion poll conducted in Lebanon confirmed the opposite: that Lebanese public opinion strongly favored Hizballah.

According to a poll conducted by Information International from August 22 to August 27, 2006, 57 percent of respondents "supported" Hizballah's kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, which initiated the conflict. According to the same poll, 79 percent of respondents rated the performance of Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah as "good/great." These numbers are noteworthy not only because they disprove Friedman's claim, but because they also represent a relative uniformity of opinion across Lebanon's notoriously divided populace.

Furthermore, even in mid-October 2006, months after the war's end, a poll conducted in Lebanon by the Center for Strategic Studies found that 78 percent of respondents believed that Israel would have attacked Lebanon "whether Hizbollah captured the Israeli soldiers or not," thus signifying that a large majority of Lebanese were unwilling to place blame on Hizballah.

Based on these numbers, it is easy to see that Thomas Friedman is rewriting history in order to justify his current support of Israel's war on Palestinian civilians. It is remarkable that he seems to have assumed that his claims could not be fact-checked in this age of ubiquitous polling.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.