Thomas Friedman is decadent and depraved

The privileged New York Times thought leader has collapsed into defending antisemitism and antisemites.

"thomas friedman" by Charles Haynes is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

In a year-and-a-half of terrible things, few of those things have been more terrible than the total failure of the American Jewish ruling class.

Few are willing to acknowledge that the American Jewish community has a class system, but like all communities, it does. Consisting of numerous self-appointed leaders and an alphabet soup of organizations, the American Jewish ruling class maintains its privilege based on the implicit understanding that it has one job: to protect the American Jewish community from antisemitism.

Yet when confronted with the first large-scale American antisemitic movement in nearly a century, this class completely collapsed. It failed to muster up even minimal resistance to the barbarians and left its people to face them alone.

The reason is simple: privilege. Rarely has a group or community faced an elite so committed—perhaps unconsciously—to its own selfish interests and outdated prejudices. Bloated on six-figure salaries, perfidious “allies,” and useless political “connections,” the American Jewish ruling class had long since become decadent, catamitic, and powerless. It could never have resisted the attack. In fact, for months, it could not even acknowledge that it was happening at all.

One of the most egregious members of this class is New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman is, in many ways, an inexplicable phenomenon. Supposedly an expert on international relations and especially the Middle East, he has been wrong about more or less everything for decades. His missives usually consist of far-left shibboleths concealed beneath the rhetoric of squishy liberalism. He regularly expresses unabashed contempt for the consensus view of the American Jewish community while presenting this contempt as the consensus view of the American Jewish community. He is also, somewhat tangentially, one of the worst writers in the Anglophone world, with a prose style so excruciating as to set any discerning reader’s teeth on edge.

I sometimes wonder at what point Friedman’s obvious charlatanism will finally become too much even for the New York Times and its media sycophants. But this time is unlikely to come: He is far too useful.

Yet it cannot be denied that Friedman remains some kind of a thought leader. The reason is obvious: Friedman is astoundingly and quintessentially privileged. Lucky or wily enough to marry a woman worth several billion dollars, Friedman lives the kind of rarified life that most American Jews—contrary to popular stereotypes—will never know. He holds a position at America’s newspaper of record, which, for other privileged Americans, inexplicably enjoys a halo effect that makes his every incompetent analysis seem like the voice of God.

American Jewish thought leaders, however, have proven no more effective or admirable than American Jewish political and cultural leaders. Their collapse has been absolute. But Friedman’s collapse is more than absolute. He has collapsed into defending antisemitism itself.

In an April 8 column (I don’t link to systemically antisemitic publications), Friedman unleashed a scathing attack on President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And amidst a barrage of seething clichés, Friedman vehemently defended a movement that is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of the American Jewish community.

It is impossible to truncate the relevant passages without compromising the evidence of their appalling nature, so I reproduce them in full:

Trump’s and Netanyahu’s domestic strategies have truly merged with the weaponization of antisemitism as a way to silence or delegitimize critics. Readers of this column know that I have zero respect for any campus protesters who bash Israeli actions in Gaza without uttering a word of censure for Hamas — let alone a word of support for Ukrainians whose democracy is being savaged by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But ours is, for now, still a free country, and if people aren’t engaging in violent acts, or harassing other students in or out of class, they should be free to say whatever they want, including advocating a Palestinian state of whatever size they want.

“President Trump has taken a real phenomenon that needs to be addressed — antisemitism that emerges out of debates on Israel — and is using it to justify crackdowns on immigration, higher education and free speech on Israel,” Jonathan Jacoby, national director of the Nexus Project, which works to fight antisemitism and uphold democracy, said to me.

As an American Jew, I neither need nor want Trump’s cynical defense. He is still the man who, in 2017, defended the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who protested in Charlottesville, Va., as including “some very fine people.” Vance has also embraced Germany’s Nazi-sympathizing, Holocaust-trivializing AfD party, whose leaders have called on Germans to stop atoning for Nazi crimes.

As Rabbi Sharon Brous of the Los Angeles congregation IKAR eloquently warned in a March 8 sermon: “We, the Jews, are being used to advance a political agenda that will cause grave harm to the social fabric, and to the institutions that are best suited to protect Jews and all minorities. We are being used. Our pain, our trauma, is being exploited to eviscerate the dream of a multiracial democracy, while advancing the goal of a white Christian nation.”

There is a stunning amount that is wrong about this rant. In fact, there is everything wrong with it. But the key phrase is: “Ours is, for now, still a free country, and if people aren’t engaging in violent acts, or harassing other students in or out of class, they should be free to say whatever they want, including advocating a Palestinian state of whatever size they want.”

But these people are universally engaging in violence, harassing students, and advocating for a Palestinian state not just of any size but one that replaces Israel entirely while slaughtering and/or expelling its Jewish population. Friedman, with the walls of privilege around him, feels free to ignore all of this, and this is a terrible and unforgivable dereliction. The reason is the human cost of his apologetics.

Over the past year and a half, I have heard innumerable horror stories from Jewish students about the atrocities and civil rights violations to which they have been subjected. At least one of those students told me they were planning to make Aliyah as a result of what they saw and experienced. In other words, young Jews are literally leaving the country because of the antisemites Friedman defends. They see no future in the United States that so many Jews have always seen as the future.

Friedman knows none of this because he cannot or will not. The walls of privilege are high and he has no desire to know what lies beyond them. It is far too frightening and, like all members of his class, Friedman is a coward.

What this amounts to is frankly horrifying, because Friedman is basically saying: Well, yes, the American Jewish community will be destroyed, but at least our enemies’ right to commit hate crimes against our children will be protected.

In other words, Friedman believes that, for the sake of abstract ideals that have never been applied to the Jews, American Jews should commit suicide. Indeed, he has decided that committing suicide is the moral thing to do.

I do not think I am alone in believing that there is nothing moral about this whatsoever. It is, in fact, a demonic position to take. What any genuinely moral person does in a situation of existential threat is to support whatever helps them strike down their mortal enemies.

The contortions required to justify Friedman’s refusal to acknowledge this are indeed impressive. For example, he appears oblivious to the fact that Trump and Vance’s remarks about the Nazis and the AfD are simply irrelevant. They change nothing about the people Friedman is defending. Those people are still genocidal antisemites who want to destroy the American Jewish community, and we know they are because they say so at every possible opportunity. They prove that they mean it by acting very much like Nazis themselves. Yet Friedman appears to think that fantasies of a “white Christian nation” are somehow more of a threat than a mass movement that quite literally wants to kill all the Jews.

The sad and appalling truth is that Friedman has assimilated into himself the worst of all antisemitic lies: That the Jews are under some kind of moral obligation to consent to their own degradation and destruction. That is not just deranged; it is monstrous. It is, in fact, quite evil. No one is obligated to do such a thing. Indeed, people like Friedman are perfectly willing to acknowledge this whenever they start babbling about Israel’s alleged transgressions against the Palestinians.

Friedman’s internalization of the lie that Jewish suicide is morally admirable is also an expression of privilege on a world-historical scale. If I had billions of dollars I didn’t earn to protect me from the world, I might feel the same way. But I don’t and most Jews don’t either. As a result, we know something that Friedman does not: The lie is a lie. The Jews’ dark history has earned us the right to resist any and all attempts to degrade and destroy us.

The truth is that Friedman’s self-debasement proves only one thing: The Jews of Privilege are dead; they just don’t know it yet. Their world is gone. If it ever existed, it was murdered on Oct. 7 itself. But it is clear that, in their death throes, they are perfectly willing not only to throw their own people under the bus but demand that the rest of us praise and admire them for it.

But those of us who are not privileged, or at least earned our privilege, have no intention of doing so. Friedman believes that his privilege makes him safe. But we know that he is not safe. None of us are. The entirety of Jewish history proves it. For the Jew, privilege is nothing, because it can all be ripped away overnight. Friedman will learn that someday, and it will not be a pleasant experience for him.

As for the rest of us, we do not intend to wait for such a dark revelation. We know what is happening and we intend to fight it. We would appreciate it if Friedman and his entire decadent and depraved ruling class got out of our way.