New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a long record of belligerent, reductive and comically shortsighted comments about the Middle East. But he may have reached a new low with his piece Friday, titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom.”
Remarkably, its title is not exaggerated clickbait but an accurate summary of a column that describes various Middle Eastern countries as different kinds of insects. Written just a week after the International Court of Justice ruled assertions that a U.S.-backed genocide is transpiring in Gaza are “plausible,” this piece of writing deploys racist tropes that only further dehumanize the people of an entire region (where the U.S. is already far too close to getting entangled in yet another conflict). To add insult to injury, the column fails at its own goal of helping the reader understand the political dynamics of the Middle East.
The West has a sordid history of describing people from the Global South as savage and animalistic.
Friedman encourages the reader to turn to the “natural world” to understand the Middle East and explains that he sometimes prefers to watch Animal Planet over CNN to understand the region. The choice of this premise in the year 2024 is … shocking. The West has a sordid history of describing people from the Global South as savage and animalistic. Immediately this analytic framework places us in the realm of social Darwinism, depicting nations as locked in a melee of survival of the fittest. While it’s true that states vie for power, often in brutal ways, portraying those struggles as a food chain crams them into an inaccurate framework. More broadly, it treats geopolitical dynamics — particularly those of domination — as natural laws, rather than permitting the reader to question them or consider alternatives.
In Friedman’s telling, Iran is a “parasitoid wasp,” which lays eggs in the “caterpillars” that the rest of the world knows as Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. These nations are then eaten “from the inside out” by the eggs: Iran-aligned organizations like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas. Somehow Hamas is also a “trap-door spider,” adept at “camouflage” and swift in its attacks.
But while Arab countries and Iran are tiny bugs — alien, pesky — in Friedman’s story the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are represented as mammals — intelligent, capable. Friedman likens the U.S. to an old lion, which reigns as the “king of the jungle,” and bemoans how “we have so many scars from so many fights that we just can’t just show up, roar loudly and expect that everyone will do what we want or scamper away.” Israel manages to avoid being the subject of a butchered analogy, but Friedman describes Netanyahu as similar to a “sifaka lemur.” Its sideways gait, Friedman writes, signifies how Netanyahu is “always shifting side to side to stay in power and avoiding going decisively backward or forward.”
Friedman’s degrading classification system tracks with racist hierarchies of civilization that have long underpinned the way that the West treats the Middle East and the Global South more broadly.
Whatever Friedman’s intentions, the final product serves as a lubricant for authorizing violence against Arabs and Iranians. Likening populations to insects is a classic emblem of fascist rhetoric, and it helps justify mass violence. As MSNBC columnist Paul Waldman has pointed out in his analysis of Donald Trump’s recent use of “vermin” to describe his enemies, “Rhetoric that classifies certain people not as humans but as insects or vermin has preceded nearly every genocide in history.”
Friedman’s piece uses genocidal tropes of dehumanization while Israel, backed by the U.S., prosecutes what various scholars and international human rights observers have described as approaching or constituting genocide and ethnic cleansing in the region. Friedman isn’t explicitly calling Palestinians insects, but the language still matters. The U.S. sees Hamas as a proxy for Iran, and it is backing Israel’s collective punishment regime in Gaza under the banner of eliminating Hamas, largely to maintain U.S. hegemony in the region. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Friedman sees Arabs and Iranians as base creatures that could be dealt with by being stomped on. That’s certainly not a far cry from when he gloried in the morally indefensible war in Iraq by pointing out how important it was to send a message to “Suck. On. This.”
The Middle East isn’t filled with barbarians, but the insistence that it is helps give license to barbarism. On top of all this, Friedman’s jungle story doesn’t tell us anything. The analogies aren’t just awkward and ill-thought out; they obscure rather than illuminate what’s driving conflict in the region, because they fail to account for why various international actors behave the way they do. For example, Friedman implies Netanyahu’s brutal treatment of Palestinians is mere domestic politicking, instead of stemming from the logic of the Israeli right’s explicitly eliminationist, colonial outlook on the Palestinian question. The Iran description is also telling: By describing Iran as a wasp, Friedman frames its behavior as instinctively, unthinkingly violent. But one need not have any sympathy for Iran’s repressive, theocratic regime to acknowledge the rational basis of its behavior. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is ideologically predisposed to hate the US,” Gregory Brew, Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, told me in a direct message, “owing to its support of the shah’s regime that fell in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the older US legacy of tampering in Iran’s internal politics, most notably through the coup d’etat of 1953. In the forty years since the revolution, Iran and the US have remained at odds, with repeated efforts to improve relations frustrated by pervasive distrust, suspicion, and mutual hostility. In geostrategic terms, Iran sees the US presence in the Middle East as a threat to its own position and its ambitions to dominate the region.” Again, the point isn’t about generating sympathy but about generating understanding. Telling Times readers that Iran is basically just a vicious swarm of insects is the kind of thing that helps our political class prepare for war with the country rather than reasonably assess Iran’s potential responses to increased instability in the region. That Friedman’s column ran in the most influential liberal paper in the U.S. says a lot about how mainstream American liberalism is complicit in the most vulgar kind of imperial hubris. The Middle East isn’t filled with barbarians, but the insistence that it is helps give license to barbarism.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
