New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred disparagingly this week to the praise that terrorism allegedly receives in "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera." In his February 18 column, Friedman wrote:

To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets--from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan--but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise.

Actually, Al Jazeera refers to such attacks as "suicide attacks"--as a quick search of the Al Jazeera website, where one can view programs online, can attest.

But if Friedman were really concerned about media praise of terrorism, he might start by raising alarms about a certain New York Times columnist by the name of Thomas Friedman.

In a January 14 column defending Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip,  Friedman praised the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians, as the "education" of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah:

Israel's counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians--the families and employers of the militants--to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

See FAIR's Action Alert: "Terrorism on the NY Times Op-Ed Page (1/14/09).

Update: To be fair to Friedman, he was presumably talking about Al Jazeera's Arab-language service, not Al Jazeera English, when he wrote that "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera," refer to suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "martyrs." So what do bloggers fluent in Arabic have to say about the columnist's assertion?  One blogger who teaches Arabic and is the former editor of the journal Arab Media and Society wrote  (Semi-Expert, 2/18/09): "Arab mainstream media, and certainly not Al Jazeera, the most mainstream of them all, in fact, don't refer to suicide bombers as martyrs." Friedman’s claim was also challenged  more harshly at the Angry Arab blog (2/18/09): "Can somebody tell this liar who does not understand Arabic, and who relies on MEMRI for his misconceptions about the Arab media that Al Jazeera does NOT refer to terrorists in Iraq as "martyrs" and does not offer them praise?”

Sometimes it's really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation's most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what "non-Americans" have to say:

Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn't through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

If you don't understand that the United States developed its economy behind high tariff walls, then you probably believe the Earth is flat.

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.

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.

In the wake of NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman's call today for terrorism against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, a new FAIR Action Alert is calling on the Times to clarify whether this column meets the paper's standards.

You can post copies of your letters to the New York Times in the comments section below. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.