Thomas Friedman’s describing the Middle East as an ‘animal kingdom’ is even worse than it sounds

by ZEESHAN ALEEM

Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman attends The Boys’ Club of New York Ninth Annual Winter Luncheon at 583 Park Avenue on February 26, 2018 in N.Y.. IMAGE/© MSNBC/MSN

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.”

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