The NYT Publishes An Anti-Jihad Column?!?? By Tom Friedman?

Definitely a flying pigs moment:

Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving. {...}

Many Arab Muslims know that what ails their societies is more than the West, and that The Narrative is just an escape from looking honestly at themselves. But none of their leaders dare or care to open that discussion. In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”

I don't know which startles me more..that a knee-jerk Islamist apologist like Tom Friedman wrote this or that Pravda-on-the-Hudson published it.

One thing that is in character with both Friedman and the New York Times is to gloss over the role that Jew hatred has in successfully promoting and implanting what Friedman refers to as 'the Narrative', both here in America and in the Arab world. And that attitude is deeply enshrined in the Qu'ran and the hadiths.

I mean, is Tom Friedman really shocked that our efforts to succor Muslims in Bosnia, the Tsunami, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kossovo and elsewhere are going to trump Islam? Especially when the Saudis are spending millions to promote exactly the narrative he's talking about?

To many Muslims,America is controlled by the Evil Joos, and America and Israel are one and the same, the Great Satan and the Little Satan as the Iranians and others would say. I'll never forget how one of Joshua's Army, just back from serving in Iraq informed me that the Iraqis routinely refer to the US as `the Jews' as in "you can't use that street today, the Jews have a road block up."

Perhaps another 'pig' folk saying applies, the one about even a blind one finding an acorn sometimes....

I never thought I say this about one of Tom Friedman's columns, but read the whole thing.Just don't make a habit out of it, in case he recovers and reverts to his normal self.