New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a long record of belligerent, reductive and comically shortsighted comments about the Middle East. But he may have reached a new low with his piece Friday, titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom.”
Remarkably, its title is not exaggerated clickbait but an accurate summary of a column that describes various Middle Eastern countries as different kinds of insects. Written just a week after the International Court of Justice ruled assertions that a U.S.-backed genocide is transpiring in Gaza are “plausible,” this piece of writing deploys racist tropes that only further dehumanize the people of an entire region (where the U.S. is already far too close to getting entangled in yet another conflict). To add insult to injury, the column fails at its own goal of helping the reader understand the political dynamics of the Middle East.
The West has a sordid history of describing people from the Global South as savage and animalistic.
Friedman encourages the reader to turn to the “natural world” to understand the Middle East and explains that he sometimes prefers to watch Animal Planet over CNN to understand the region. The choice of this premise in the year 2024 is … shocking. The West has a sordid history of describing people from the Global South as savage and animalistic. Immediately this analytic framework places us in the realm of social Darwinism, depicting nations as locked in a melee of survival of the fittest. While it’s true that states vie for power, often in brutal ways, portraying those struggles as a food chain crams them into an inaccurate framework. More broadly, it treats geopolitical dynamics — particularly those of domination — as natural laws, rather than permitting the reader to question them or consider alternatives.
In Friedman’s telling, Iran is a “parasitoid wasp,” which lays eggs in the “caterpillars” that the rest of the world knows as Lebanon, Yemen,…
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