Newspaper Reader
Nov 19, 2025
Editor: Mr. Friedman’s topic sentence:
I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum
…
Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: Where can and when will the reader confront the vexing question of The Gaza Genocide? Mr. Friedman presents this carefully taylored descriptor.
And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: It’s not ‘a radical Jewish settler problem’ its a problem with the very question of what the Zionist Project is, was and remaines! This quote from Maximilien Robespierre is bound is bound to raise the hackles of respectable bourgeois opinionators like Friedman and his followers !
“To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption… It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight.”
Maximilien Robespierre
This quote from Maximilien Robespierre see:
Editor: Reader let me focus my attention to Mr Friedman’s recapitulation of the actors in his self-apologeic exercise in historical revisionism, wedded to mendacity, and the cultivation of an audience habituated to his partucular brand of ‘story telling’ !
Of course, President Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. Just as he had no problem with the recent love-fest/interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, promoting Fuentes’s white nationalist neo-Nazi sympathies.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s defense of Carlson centered mainly on his own ego. He’s “said good things about me over the years,” the president said of Carlson. So nothing else should matter?
Trump could have said that Carlson has a right to interview anyone he wants, something that should never be suppressed, but that he was very troubled by the open contempt being directed by Fuentes at Jewish Americans. But neither Trump nor Vance said that — because they undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.
How far we have fallen. We’ve had political movements in the past use antisemitism to try to get to the White House — for example, those who wanted the well-known antisemite Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 — but until Vance and Trump we have not seen it being normalized to try to stay in power. We have seen Jewish supremacists, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, get elected to the Israeli Knesset, but we have never seen them setting Israeli defense policy, until Bibi gave them the keys. We have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations aplenty over the years, but never ones, that I recall, which gave such a complete pass to Hamas after its mass murder of Israeli civilians.
This is how norms collapse — and take their societies down with them.
So, to Trump, Vance, Netanyahu and the pro-Hamas protesters, I have one message. It’s the one offered by Liz Cheney to her fellow G.O.P. House members who gave Trump a pass for stoking the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Editor: Liz Cheney is the eventual measure that Friedman offers his readers as exemplary!
Newspaper Reader.
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