March 22, 2004, will go down in Middle East history as the day Israel finally crossed the line.

There were, perhaps, two Palestinians whose murder would have stirred revolt across the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim masses: Yasser Arafat and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. For starters, the Israelis decided to kill Yassin.

This almost-blind and frail cleric was the founding member of Hamas, which rose out of the occupied territories of Palestine in 1987 as a part of the first Intifada. Widely acknowledged as the leader of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas), Yassin arguably held considerable sway over the Izzadine al-Qassam brigades, the military wing, of the organization. While the Israelis claim Yassin was directly responsible for every suicide bombing organized by Hamas, he was also the person who played a considerable role in convincing the cadre of the Izzadine al-Qassam brigades to observe a short-lived ceasefire with Israel last year.

Now Yassin has been replaced by Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader less given to cease fires and dialogue with the Israelis. But that doesn’t matter, because the Israelis will kill him too, and the one after him, until there are no Palestinians left. Unless, of course, the Palestinians settle their dispute with Israel with an unconditional surrender.

Surrender seems unlikely. More likely is a scenario where Hamas and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade will follow Israel’s example and start the targeted killing of Israeli politicians, along with their usual suicide bombings of civilians. Even the leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, has offered help to Hamas in seeking revenge for Yassin’s murder, thereby reawakening the nightmare of a coordinated two-front attack on Israel by Islamic radicals.

Even before the assassination of Yassin, in the midst of this bad-becomes-worse scenario, the suggestions of American columnists, such as the celebrated Thomas Friedman, bordered on the ridiculous.

Friedman’s writings in The New York Times in March applauded American jobs in India and claimed they would help end terrorism, Islamic terrorism, while at the same time deriding Spain for having created an “axis of appeasement.”

It seemed odd that Friedman did not see Western jobs in Spain as having failed to contain terror. Surely there were plenty of lucrative jobs in Spain for Muslims, then why did they not set aside their bombs?

Perhaps, if the Indians told Friedman they were planning to donate half of their income to Palestinian relief organizations, one would understand the Friedman connection between Indian prosperity and a reduction in Islamic terrorism, but Friedman did not mention any such movement.

Indians did, at one time, contribute funds to the Palestinian cause. Under the brutal rule of Indira Gandhi, herself an avid champion of anti-terror terrorism, the Prime Minister’s Office used to run two tax-deductible charities open for donations from the public. One was directing funds to the African National Congress and the other to the PLO.

Those charities, however, died with Indira Gandhi. So how exactly do Indians with American jobs help defeat terrorism?

American jobs in India are not even helping fight terrorism even in that country. These jobs are not offered in Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Indian state where disgruntled sections of the population have been running violent terror campaigns. The jobs, in effect, draw out the educated and Americanized youth from these regions, leaving behind a local economy and community all the worse for their departure.

And, of course, you can’t have most of these jobs if you don’t speak Americanese.

Friedman’s arrogant assertions seem to stem from the belief that throwing money at young people will help them forget the grave injustices visited upon their community. One would buy this theory if it were not for the fact that the cadre of terror organizations have, for over twenty years, been amply filled with volunteers from educated, middle class families. Most recently, these include the members of the Finsbury Park mosque in England.

Mr. Friedman, Hamas members will not quit their complaining, shouting, shooting and bombing if they are offered jobs to sell credit cards to Americans over the phone.

Yes, healthier economies, better employment and higher quality of life will help curb terrorism as they will take away the socio-economic factors that cause misery and grief in terror-prone communities. But what good is a telemarketing job if your family and friends are still getting shot, bulldozed, bombed and otherwise dismembered? How can any community under military occupation thrive on American commercialism but give up its dreams of liberty?

This, of course, is not the only absurdity to have escaped Friedman’s laptop. The esteemed and highly paid Times columnist has never missed an opportunity to create an opportunity – from the internet to the Lexus and now to telemarketing, Friedman’s always got some new exciting way of ending the tension in the Middle East. The only thing he does not recommend, of course, is an immediate end to Israeli occupation. He also does not discuss the role of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

And while Friedman’s columns may be mildly irritating for their disorientation, mainstream journalism has its fair share of outright propagandists and policy peddlers. Some of them, like William Safire and Peggy Noonan, were speech writers for Nixon and Reagan. These scribes, who wrote fancy lines for lying politicians, now spread further misinformation to serve the interests of their erstwhile colleagues. Others, like Mortimer B. Zuckerman, are outright Zionist hawks, or, like Robert Novak, are celebrated scribes who now wear their dirty politics on their sleeves.

These scribes think nothing of creating infinite opportunities for the peddling of official partial-truths and lies. These lies are meant to keep the American public strictly in line with the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Of course, these lies will not keep the Hamas member from catching the next bus to Tel Aviv. Nor will these lies reduce terrorism against America.

Abhinav Aima is an Instructor of Journalism at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

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