NY Times’ Friedman, A Jew, Uses The “Denier” Label In CNN Interview
Tom Friedman, a NY Times‘ columnist, is also Jewish. According to his Wiki-ography, he “attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar Mitzvah… He became enamored of Israel after a visit there in December 1968, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on Kibbutz Hahotrim, near Haifa.
He has characterized his high school years as ‘one big celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.’ “
So it was a little surprising to hear Friedman call global-warming skeptics “climate deniers” in a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed, in reference to the latest report by the UN’s IPCC. Friedman says,
I was thinking, driving over here, what if the nightmare of the climate deniers came true and we really decided in America to take this seriously and act? What would we do? What is the nightmare that would happen?
This comes on the heels of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denouncing Dr. Roy Spencer for calling climate-change alarmists “global-warming Nazis”, his response to the continued and explicit use of the word “denier” by pundits like Friedman. Spencer wrote:
I am calling out the ADL for not denouncing the widespread use of Nazi Holocaust imagery in public statements made by journalists, politicians, and even some scientists over the last 7+ years towards us global warming skeptics. … The ADL would appear to have decided (based upon their years of silence) that using Holocaust imagery is OK on one side of the global warming issue, but not the other.
With the ADL remaining silent on the issue since 2007, when the term global-warming denier was first used by Ellen Goodman in the BostonGlobe, don’t expect too much protestation over Friedman’s intentional choice of words. As Charles Krauthammer recently wrote in the Washington Post,
Anyone who disagrees is then branded “anti-science” and, better still, a “denier” — a brilliantly chosen calumny meant to impute to the climate skeptic the opprobrium normally reserved for the hatemongers and crackpots who deny the Holocaust.
Shelley Rose wrote the following back in late February (emphasis added):
It has become too common to use comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazi imagery to attack people with opposing views, whether the issue is global warming, immigration or stem-cell research. The six million Jewish victims and millions of other victims of Hitler deserve better. Their deaths should not be used for political points or sloganeering. This type of comparison diminishes and trivializes the Holocaust. There is no place for it in civil discussions.
Who is Shelley Rose? She is an Interim Regional Director at the southeast ADL. After posting this statement on their website, the ADL had to close down the comments section because so many people wanted to know why the ADL doesn’t denounce people like Tom Friedman who toss around words like climate denier with impunity.
The word “denier” is meant to vilify another person who actually looks at the global-warming science and is skeptical of the so-called “consensus.” It is used to attack a person’s character instead of addressing the issue at hand.
The only thing worse than a Jewish person calling someone a ‘climate denier’ are the crickets coming from the ADL, which has chosen to remain silent on this despicable means of discourse.
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