Riverbend at Baghdad Burning neatly demolishes Thomas Friedman’s shallow and ill-informed NYT rumination on the complex and tense situation vis a vis Iraqi Sunni and Shiites:
“One thing I found particularly amusing about the article- and outrageous all at once-was in the following paragraph:
“Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite’s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governor’s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and they are indifferent to their brutalization.”
Now, it is always amusing to see a Jewish American journalist speak in the name of Sunni Arabs. When Sunni Arabs, at this point, hesitate to speak in a representative way about other Sunni Arabs, it is nice to know Thomas L. Friedman feels he can sum up the feelings of the “Sunni Arab world” in so many words. His arrogance is exceptional.
It is outrageous because for many people, this isn’t about Sunnis and Shia or Arabs and Kurds. It’s about an occupation and about people feeling that they do not have real representation. We have a government that needs to hide behind kilometers of barbed wire and meters and meters of concrete- and it’s not because they are Shia or Kurdish or Sunni Arab- it’s because they blatantly supported, and continue to support, an occupation that has led to death and chaos. [My emphasis]
The paragraph is contemptible because the idea of a “Shia leader” is not an utterly foreign one to Iraqis or other Arabs, no matter how novel Friedman tries to make it seem. How dare he compare it to having a black governor in Alabama in the 1920s? In 1958, after the July 14 Revolution which ended the Iraqi monarchy, the head of the Iraqi Sovereignty Council (which was equivalent to the position of president) was Mohammed Najib Al-Rubayi- a Shia from Kut. From 1958 – 1963, Abdul Karim Qassim, a Shia also from Kut in the south, was the Prime Minister of Iraq (i.e. the same position Jaffari is filling now). After Abdul Karim Qassim, in 1963, came yet another Shia by the name of Naji Talib as prime minster. Even during the last regime, there were two Shia prime ministers filling the position for several years- Sadoun Humadi and Mohammed Al-Zubaidi.
In other words, Sunni Arabs are not horrified at having a Shia leader (though we are very worried about the current Puppets’ pro-Iran tendencies). Friedman seems to conveniently forget that while the New Iraq’s president was a polygamous Arab Sunni- Ghazi Al-Yawir- the attacks were just as violent. Were it simply a matter of Sunnis vs. Shia or Arabs vs. Kurds, then Sunni Arabs would have turned out in droves to elect “Al Baqara al dhahika” (“the cow that laughs” or La Vache Qui Rit- it’s an Iraqi joke) as Al-Yawir is known amongst Iraqis. “
