The Daily Beast website said that Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, encourages a bloody conflict in the Middle East using obscene metaphors that compare Muslims to insects and parasites, and described him as a lover of war, whether justified or ill.

The site explained - in writer Ben Burgess's column - that Friedman was the most enthusiastic supporter in the New York Times of George W. Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until his reputation worsened due to his constant calls that the United States needed "another six months" to change the course of the war and achieve a "Decent result" until the six-month period was called "Friedman's Unit".

The writer said that - knowing Friedman's record - he should not have been surprised by his recent contribution to making the American discourse on foreign policy more bloodthirsty and more naive, but he was surprised nonetheless.

Caterpillars and wasp eggs

Thus, Friedman wrote in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world that he “prefers to think” about the complexities of war and politics in the Middle East, and he went on to say, “According to Science Daily, the wasp injects its eggs into a live caterpillar, and the small wasp larvae slowly devour the caterpillar (the second larval stage of "Insect growth stages) from the inside out to explode once those larvae are satisfied."

After narrating this scientific fact, Friedman wondered: Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq today than that they are caterpillars, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a hornet, since the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host, and eat it from the inside out? “We have no counter-strategy that can safely and efficiently kill the hornet without setting the entire forest on fire,” he commented.

On the other hand, the writer, who found the analogy extremely ugly, imagined “if a widely circulated newspaper wrote an editorial comparing Israeli soldiers and settlers to termites, for example, and saying that the difficulty facing Iran and Hamas is that they are trying to figure out how to kill termites (safely and efficiently) without detonating the entire house." Would this be worse than what Friedman already wrote?"

The writer described Friedman's speech as no worse in this hypothetical situation than in the context of the real world, because it goes back to this type of inhumane colonial metaphors, at a time when Israel caused the displacement of 1.9 million residents of Gaza, and the International Court of Justice issued a temporary ruling against it concluding the existence of a "Real and imminent danger of genocide."

In such harsh conditions in Gaza and the possibility of “genocide” referred to by the International Court, Friedman likens the United States and Israel to people facing the sad dilemma of how to kill “the hornet and its eggs,” including the “egg” Hamas in Gaza, without burning the entire area.

Confronting Iran aggressively

Although Friedman - as the writer says - is not a fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sees him as too extremist, and although he is a supporter of a two-state solution when all this is over, he does not call on Israel to agree to a long-term ceasefire, and he does not see the United States backing down completely. Critical to a broader regional war on the verge of breaking out.

In his last article in the New York Times before he thought about the Middle East as a jungle full of hornets, Friedman said that the problem with Netanyahu's positions is that he makes it more difficult for Washington.

He called on the United States to bring together “NATO and the Arab and Muslim allies it needs to confront Iran in a more aggressive way,” hoping that this “more aggressive” action would not turn into an all-out war.

Because Tehran is in a much stronger position than the Taliban or Iraq were when George W. Bush launched his wars in the early 21st century, this war will be much worse, and therefore if the United States imposes its will in the “jungle” of the Middle East and “confronts Iran in a more aggressive manner,” how many atrocities will Friedman's units inflict on ordinary people trying to live their lives in that "jungle"?

This is what the Pulitzer Prize winner might have to stop to think about if he allows himself to remember that the inhabitants of the countries where the United States and Israel are waging war are humans, not caterpillars hosting the eggs of parasitic wasps.

Source: Daily Beast + Aljazeera