Culture, Israel, Mishegas, Politics

Dear Tom Friedman, the Tea Party and Hezbollah are not the same thing

This guestpost is by RhetoricWatch. Though operating under a pseudonym here, RhetoricWatch is a professional in the field of Jewish journalism.
Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear: The Tea Party is not a terrorist organization.
I don’t agree with its ideas, tactics or policy suggestions, and I’m worried about its seemingly rising influence in this country, which seems anti-intellectual, simplistic and detached from reality. Moreover, its rhetoric–which at times seems nativist and racist–is feeding a current of hatred and fear in this country that troubles me.
But none of this makes the Tea party comparable to Hezbollah. Not even close.
Which is why these couple sentences from Tom Friedman’s recent article on Norway–buried near the bottom of the page–surprised me:

Alas, that is the Tea Party… If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

Remember, Friedman is referring to the same Hezbollah that has launched many deadly attacks on Israel, that calls for Israel’s destruction as a state, that advocates extremist Muslim rule in the Middle East and that openly praised the killing of 200 US Marines in 1983. The Tea Party’s rhetoric may be bad, but it’s nowhere near that bad.
It surprises me all the more that it’s Friedman writing this. Friedman, who made a name for himself covering the Lebanese-Israeli conflict. Friedman, who writes about Israel and its terrorist enemies frequently and who focuses his columns on trying to avoid the extreme positions that some in Israel and the Middle East take. He should know better.
It’s not even a good analogy. Unlike the Tea Party, which is (as Friedman noted) a faction within the Republican party – and a small one at that – Hezbollah is a major political party in Lebanon. It is a faction in the ruling coalition, but it has representation in parliament and seats in the cabinet. Oh, and it’s also a violent terrorist organization – if I forgot to mention that before.
A better analogy, I think, would be to Yisrael Beiteinu, a hard-right – and nonviolent – political party. It is also independent, unlike the Tea Party, but like the Tea Party it advocates anti-democratic and counterproductive policy in Israel – combined with extremist rhetoric.
One major and consistent complaint that the left in the US has had against the Tea Party is that it cheapens tragic events like the Holocaust by making outlandish comparisons. This is a valid concern, and one worth caring about. But if we’re going to harshly criticize right-wing pundits for such comparisons, we need to call out left-wing pundits for bad comparisons as well.
Tom Friedman can and should criticize the Tea Party. He shouldn’t compare it to Hezbollah.

28 thoughts on “Dear Tom Friedman, the Tea Party and Hezbollah are not the same thing

  1. Remember, Friedman is referring to the same Hezbollah that has launched many deadly attacks on Israel, that calls for Israel’s destruction as a state, that advocates extremist Muslim rule in the Middle East
    Another victim of the AIPAC echo-chamber machine, I see. Next RhetoricWatch is going to try to convince us that Hamas’s leadership is actually not prepared to come to a deal with Israel.

  2. Friedman does his best to be a world class hack. Ignore this drivel,NOTHING he ever writes is logical, educational, or news worthy…

  3. The paragraph you cited is not a matter of opinion, but rather one of fact. Hezbollah has in fact launched attacks (for which they took full responsibility) that killed civilians in Israel (hence, deadly). Hezbollah has repeatedly, explicitly called for Israel’s destruction. And yes, Hezbollah is not, by any stretch of the means, a liberal movement. Rather, it is a movement that explicitly calls for fundamentalist Muslim rule.
    Again, to stress the point, this is not my own analysis, nor AIPAC’s. This is what Hezbollah is and what it does–right or wrong (and yes, I think it’s very wrong).

  4. Again, to stress the point, this is not my own analysis, nor AIPAC’s. This is what Hezbollah is and what it does–right or wrong (and yes, I think it’s very wrong).
    I know. Trust me, I know.

  5. Way to miss the point of Friedman’s article.. Lets spend our time discussing to what degree the Tea Party is or isn’t like Hezbolah instead of the fact that the Republicans have manufactured this crisis and have held the world hostage.

  6. thank you, sanity. i’m not sure why it’s unclear that Friedman’s point is that the Tea Party has hijacked the GOP in similar fashion to Hezbollah hijacking the Lebanese government. What’s more, I think it’s safe to assume two things: 1) Friedman knows WAY more about Hezbollah than anyone reading or writing for this blog, 2) There is more to Hezbollah than their conflict with Israel.
    and what does “a professional in the field of Jewish journalism” mean, anyways? For all we know you work in the mail room of some local Jewish rag. What is so controversial about this post that you need to protect the anonymity of your name and your affiliation?

  7. and what does “a professional in the field of Jewish journalism” mean, anyways? For all we know you work in the mail room of some local Jewish rag. What is so controversial about this post that you need to protect the anonymity of your name and your affiliation?
    Maybe it means a self-righteous young rabbi?

  8. “Way to miss the point of Friedman’s article.. Lets spend our time discussing to what degree the Tea Party is or isn’t like Hezbolah instead of the fact that the Republicans have manufactured this crisis and have held the world hostage.”
    So we shouldn’t criticize tea partiers for making comparisons to the holocaust? We should focus on the point of thier comparisons right? Exaggerated comparisons like this on both sides raise are cheap shots that make light of more serious situations.

  9. Sorry. The last sentence of my comment should read: Exaggerated comparisons like this on both sides are cheap shots that make light of more serious situations.

  10. @J1-
    self-righteousness has nothing to do with it, nor does my title. the author quips that they are a “professional in the field of Jewish journalism” like that qualifies them to make the critique they are making. Any Jew can feel indignant towards Friedman — any person, for that matter. The fact that they are a journalism (perhaps) or employed by some type of Jewish publication does not seem relevant. If they are a journalist who regularly covers Lebanese politics or Hezbollah specifically, this is a different story. If they are a respected journalist at a prestigious paper with an active and respected global politics beat, that’s also different. If this author is a low-level employee at a local Jewish paper their job affiliation does not qualify them to make these statements any more than another job affiliation so why specify it? But way to make legitimate critique and questions personal…

  11. “A better analogy, I think, would be to Yisrael Beiteinu, a hard-right – and nonviolent – political party. It is also independent, unlike the Tea Party, but like the Tea Party it advocates anti-democratic and counterproductive policy in Israel – combined with extremist rhetoric.”
    Not a better comparison. Yisrael Beiteinu definitely advocates violence, although implicitly. It is a thing in itself, steeped in Soviet style threats.

  12. Dan O.,
    Go ahead, take this one step further. How should we respond to these implicitly violent Soviet-style miscreants? How do we stop them? What should be done to them?

  13. Thomas Friedman is a testament to the sad reality that somebody can attend prestigious universities and win exalted prizes and still be a silly ass. There’s probably no greater indication of waning writing powers than the ridiculous hyperbole.
    And, My Dear Mr. Rhetoricwatch,, the folks in the Tea Party might be wrong. But I see no evidence that they are bad.

  14. the author quips that they are a “professional in the field of Jewish journalism” like that qualifies them to make the critique they are making.
    Ok, I see your point.

  15. so googling “RhetoricWatch” gives a possible answer, since that was the title of a column from a Minnesota based journalist who also happens to be the author of a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, if that is the author, and had the author said “RhetoricWatch is a professional journalist and author of a book detailing the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” then I would have said nothing. So, why on Earth, if this is in fact the author, would he not have come clean on the nature of his expertise? it’s beyond me.

  16. Thank you oh wise writer for realizing that the Tea Party, a populist movement begun during the Bush Admin and addressing the nations dire fiscal straights, is racist and horrid but atleast its not a terrorist organization. Really with social moderators like you, we on the right don’t enemies.
    If by nativist you mean enforcing our immigration and labor laws, rather than create a new ethnic underclass that undercuts our own native poor, then yes I’m a Tea Party fellow. If by racist you mean we oppose a President who has seen the national debt double and the last President who began the TARP programs, then yes I’m a Tea Partier.
    Your arguement is jejune and weak. You name a group of millions of people you disagree with slanderous names but position yourself as a moderate by positing that atleast they aren’t terrorists. You position yourself with this piece as some sort of moderate but only by reaching out to an insane analogy and coming two steps in. Thank you for helping debase the political discourse, obviously more name calling and stereotyping is precisely what we need.
    This is the same slander that has been going on in the contemporary left for as long as I can recall, from the Million Mom March for Commonsense Gun Control to the March for Womens lives (both of which I attended), to the caricatures of Bush as Hitler, to constant assumption that the Nation, Mother Jones, and the American Progressive take that the “other side” isn’t just wrong but that they have anti-democratic goals – ie that they are evil.

  17. Friedman, who writes about Israel and its terrorist enemies frequently and who focuses his columns on trying to avoid the extreme positions that some in Israel and the Middle East take. He should know better.
    Speaking of the Middle East, two articles from this week:
    http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=232832
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/aug/03/egypt-syria-libya-middle-east-unrest
    @Victor.
    I’m still waiting for one Jewschool post about this stuff. After all of the arguments for all of these years, that suddenly never happened–it’s just dumbfounding.

  18. J1,
    If you really want to beat your head against the wall..
    I happen to have Arab friends. I mean, Arabs, not Arab-Americans. I know, it’s not appropriate, what with me being a proud and practicing Jew… I mean, a Zionist, and all. Anyway, I have them, in a friendship way, not a slave way. So, I talk to them, every now and again, and we recently had a conversation about Syria. Oh my, I’m so tired of this, I’ll have to make it brief.
    Basically, the intellectual elite in Syria supports the regime. Why? They are genuinely concerned that any change in regime is MORE likely to make peace with Israel. This is the talk of the Syrian twitter/facebook feeds. They don’t want peace with Israel, the educated people. So the regime is playing up to this and saying, look how much we’ve done to resist the Zionists. We supported Hezbollah (the only Arabs to defeat the Zionists). We host Hamas and give them money. We are the spine of Arab resistance to Israel. Etc, etc.
    BUT, the opposition jumped on this and is now saying “resist the Zionists? you collaborate with the Zionists! the Syrian border is the quietest border Israel had since 1973! you jail bloggers who criticize the government for not conquering back the Golan”. Etc, etc.
    Adding to all the confusion, Hezbollah came out in support of Assad. The Syrians LOVED Hezbollah for defeating the Zionists. Every Syrian boy dressed up like a Hezbollah fighter. And now Nasrallah is cheering on Assad’s tanks as they murder Syrians in the streets. So, Assad’s resistance trump card (Hezbollah) is gone, because no one respects Hezbollah anymore as a resistance movement (because resistance movements aren’t supposed to endorse regime crackdowns against popular revolutions).
    Are you still with me? But the singular constant is how completely united Syrian society is in decrying any normalization or peace with Israel. Forget the Golan, it’s not about that at all and never was. These people have cousins being gunned down in Hama, and all they can think about is who will resist Israel better, Assad or whoever replaces him. Thousands dead, thousands jailed or disappeared, and fighting Zionism is the primary friggin consideration for whether to support their own revolution or not!
    What is a Jewschool blogger supposed to do with that, Jonathan1? You think DAWM or… who haven’t I picked on for a long time… dlevy is able to incorporate that level of hostility to Jewish self-determination into their positronic matrix? Have some pity.
    An easy fast to everyone.

  19. @Victor.
    We disagree on Zionism, and we also disagree to some extent on this issue, because I’m not so interested in what type of Syria-Israeli agreement might happen in the future, or the Golan’s future,
    because resistance movements aren’t supposed to endorse regime crackdowns against popular revolutions
    But neither are self-proclaimed Progressive Jews. And that’s what we’ve seen for decades. That’s what we’ve seen on this forum for years now!!
    After all of the arguments? After all of the shots leveled against those who have said to be very cautious in dealing with these so-called “moderate” regimes? Now every day we see murder going on by the Assad government, the very regime that the West was supposed to embrace because the world is a more complicated place than what’s presented on the AIPAC-talking sheets? Those AIPAC talking-sheets fooled us about the “moderate” Mubarak regime too. Remember? Where is everybody now? What happened?
    That’s life, I guess.

  20. Ultimately, there are some political movements to whom it is cool to show off their guns at their rallies. Hezbollah and the Tea Party are two of them.

  21. When you tell me when you stopped beating your wife, then I’ll tell you when I’ve started endorsing Arab dictators.
    Hey, there was a shooting of leftist teens in Norway by a self-proclaimed Islamophobe! WHY ISN’T JEWSCHOOL COVERING THAT?!
    There are also riots in England stemming from poverty and tensions with the police, and have a strong racial undercurrent! WY NO JOOSKOOL COVER?!
    It’s almost as if they’re a small blog with a small contributing pool with a narrow focus, isn’t it?

  22. “Some of my best friends are Arabs!”
    It’s not as if the Syrian conflict is driven by economic, religious, and ethnic divides. It’s not as if the protesters are clamoring for right to assembly and other human rights. Or, for that matter, a simple power play between bourgeois and proletariat.
    No, the driving factor MUST be Israel hatred. How can we hate on Jews better today: Through an Alawite dictatorship or representative democracy? Because simply working together to fight THE ENEMY surely isn’t an option.

  23. @BBN
    Do you expect me to believe that you never noticed all of the posts here about the need for the US to engage “moderate” Arab countries–“because the world is more complicated than what we’ve been led to believe by AIPAC talking-point sheets?”
    Do you expect me to believe that you never noticed the year’s worth of arguments here over reaching out to Arab dictators (and you’ve always expressed wariness over that policy as well, I know.)?
    Were there all kinds of posts here about reaching out to violent Islamaphobes (sp?) in Norway? Seriously, have there been here, maybe I just missed them?
    What is this sudden collective amnesia?

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