A More Unkind & More Brutal Nation

Thomas Friedman is looking for signs of intelligent life here in the United States and in the world around us, while others look out into space for it, as the other post today indicates.

Friedman opines in the New York Times:

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.
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Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

(Where Did ‘We’ Go?). The right is pulling us toward unkindness, brutality, insensitivity, dumbing down, and everything we have worked to overcome in this nation.

This trend is showing up in other nations where neoCons are raising the stench of hatred. Terrorists are the worst, but why the neoCons get more hateful instead of more humane, to fight the spread of terrorism, is the perplexing part of this equation.