It's astonishing. Thomas Friedman's op-ed in today's New York Times starts out very promising. He quotes two sources in his article, both of whom are anti-Idiotarians, a group to which Friedman hardly belongs. Friedman makes the points that the war on terror is important, that the grievances of the 9/11 terrorists are the resul of their own failings, not our's, and that, Arabist aplogists notwithstanding, the Western system of free and democratic government is the best one on Earth.



And then, out of nowhere, this sentence appears:

Because our presidents want to get votes, they readily tell the Palestinians how foolishly they are behaving, but they hesitate to tell Israelis how destructive their West Bank settlements are for the future of the Jewish state.

Thomas Friedman manages to criticize Israeli settlement policy in every article he writes. No matter what the topic is, or how irrelevant Israeli settlement policy is to that topic. It's truly astonishing.