Thomas Friedman, "Judgment Not Included": The Bullshit Never Stops

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Judgment Not Included" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/friedman-judgment-not-included.html), Thomas Friedman opines on the Boston Marathon bombings and Islamic radicalism. Friedman writes:

"Moreover, some 70,000 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed by other Muslims in the Syrian civil war, which the U.S. had nothing to do with — although many Muslims are now begging us to intervene to stop it. And every week innocent Muslims are blown up by Muslim suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq — every week. Thousands of them have been maimed and killed in attacks so nihilistic that the bombers don’t even bother to give their names or make demands. Yet this does not appear to have moved the brothers Tsarnaev one iota.

Why is that? We surely must not tar all of Islam in this. Having lived in the Muslim world, I know how unfair that would be. But we must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?"

"We surely must not tar all of Islam in this"? All of Islam? No. But consider Bill Maher's interchange with Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism. "Could they do the 'Book of Islam' on Broadway?" No way in hell.

Friedman concludes:

"And that’s why the faster, more accessible and ultramodern the Internet becomes, the more all the old-fashioned stuff matters: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong. Those you can’t download. They have to be uploaded, the old-fashioned way, by parents around the dinner table, by caring but demanding teachers at school and by responsible spiritual leaders in a church, synagogue, temple or mosque. Somewhere, somehow, that did not happen, or stopped happening, with the brothers Tsarnaev."

Spiritual leaders in mosques are going to take a stand against "honor killings" against women and declare that Muslims who convert to other religions should not be executed? Some 84% of Egyptian Muslims believe that those abandoning Islam should die (see: http://www.pewglobal.org/2010/12/02/muslims-around-the-world-divided-on-hamas-and-hezbollah/). From where do Egyptians, many of them illiterate, form these views if not from the sermons of their "spiritual leaders"?

Go back to sleep, Tom, before you hurt yourself.