Matt Yglesias reads Tom Friedman so you don’t have to:
I think I lack the words to adequately express how morally outrageous Tom Friedman’s call for a Muslim civil war is. But we can at least focus a bit on how factually inaccurate it is.
I was all ready to be outraged, but it turns out Friedman probably isn’t asking for the military kind of civil war at all:
We don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas….Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam….What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public….How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few….Etc.
I say Friedman “probably” isn’t asking for a military conflict because, unfortunately, he also includes a paragraph about the “ferocity” of the American civil war and says, “Islam needs the same civil war.” But it’s still couched as a war against bad ideas, and I imagine that’s what he’s really focused on. Still, Friedman could stand to clear this up for us. Just what kind of war does he want in the Muslim world?
