Friedman Advises the Arabs, U.S. Taxpayers.

It's funny.
The diversity bug hasn't appeared yet to hit the NYTimes editorial board.  With at least 3 (count 'em) ethnically white Jewish male columnists -- writing on politics (Friedman), economics (Krugman) and sociology (Brooks), and two Irish Catholic American women (Dowd and Collins) writing, they often overlap on topics.

No religious (or non religious) Muslims, Persians or Arabs are given a twice-weekly voice, so today the Jewish-American columnist writing on global politics steps to the plate to tell us what his travels have personally learned him...

Like Brooks, Friedman's attention is captured by American outsiders who set up a non-profit (which often pay their employees handsomely, despite the "non profit" tax-exempt status), designed to educate their lessers.  Sadly, these community organizing campaigns rarely produce sustaining results, as the President saw in his temporary work to bring change to Chicago's South Side.  I guess you could argue the environment would be worse today had these educated folks not brought their time and talents, temporarily, to a depressed region.

Where I must call Friedman back though, is on his plans for the U.S. taxpayers to finance the remaking of the Middle East -- he specifically addresses Jordan in today's work, where his jetsetting brought him last month:

A FEW weeks ago, I was in Amman, Jordan, talking with educators, when I met a young American woman with the most remarkable job description. Her name was Shaylyn Romney Garrett. She introduced herself by saying that she and her husband, James, were former Peace Corps volunteers in Jordan who had stayed on to start a nonprofit, Think Unlimited. It helps Jordanian schoolteachers learn how to “teach creative thinking and problem solving” in their classrooms. “Now that,” I said, “would be the real Arab Spring.”
...
The Garretts, with some backing from Queen Rania of Jordan’s school-reform initiative, designed a program to enable and inspire Jordanian teachers to adopt a much more creative approach to education. They also conduct summer “Brain Camps” for young students to hone their problem-solving skills by creating solutions for water shortage. Garrett told me one story, though, that really stuck in my mind.

“There was a 16-year-old girl in our Peace Corps village in Jordan,” she said. “She came from a very conservative family, always wearing Islamic dress. When you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said ‘doctor,’ which is what they all say, because it is the most prestigious job. After completing our six-day summer camp, she realized, though, that she could do something else with her talent, that she could be a change-agent. So she started a girls’ club in the village. [At the camp,] we teach kids the concept of ‘brainstorming,’ and one day we were walking together and she was running ideas past me, and she said, ‘Miss Shaylyn, I stormed my brain last night to think of different ideas for what the theme of my club should be.’ She eventually made it a leadership club.”

It was an example, said Garrett, of taking a specific creative-thinking skill — brainstorming — and applying it to her community.

Now, I'm glad the Garrett's traveled abroad and created jobs for themselves  to help teenage girls plan their own social clubs.  These days, simply embracing the "leadership" mantra -- declaring that your mission -- goes a long way in America too.  We tend to silence those who ask honest questions/ look for real results on the ground, and it takes some time for the performance measuring tools to catch up to these self-nominated leaders' " boasts.

In corporate circles, this is know as paying respect to the Jamie Dimons, compensating them handsomely for their failures -- even if it means using taxpayer bailout dollars -- then pretending these men  (think Donald Trump, who has played the system again and again for personal gain) -- are businessmen to be emulated.  The false commodification of values  ("IF I have money, I must be smart and successful, no matter my lack of results long term) is a lot of what's currently wrong in the world -- women's/girls' worth in many Western circles become reduced to pricey purchases, with women as flesh trophies to keep at home and pull out for respectability purposes (think, the Kennedy women) while our men's worth seems not so much character-driven, but "I got mine, more than you, so I win."

It's sad, and it's catching up with us -- take a look around.

Throw out the tests of character, the natural "morality" which indeed comes back to level plenty in the end, and the "scratch mine, I'll scratch yours" networking mindset, which causes so many of these repeat losers to turn up again and again proffering "advice", nevermind how many times they've been proven wrong in the pasts or needed bail outs.

Which brings us to Israel. 

Imagine if, instead of confiscating innocent Palestinian lands to compensate for the Holocaust, a section of Germany had been carved out for Europe's victimized Jews... what a different world it would be out there right now.  Instead, the Germans have successfully insulated themselves, having decades ago cast out their own potential Bernie Madoff's (and then some) who would work the system for their own gains, playing spoiler to those who respected the rules of the game, and essentially shorting the system in the process.

Now,
Mr. Friedman stands atop his soapbox, advising not Israel's taxpayers, but ironically America's, in how we can pony up to provide better opportunities to Arab youth.  Geopolitically of course, it would be wiser for Israel to take the lead in loving her neighbors;  Americans would be far better off caring about the futures of youth in Mexico, Central and Latin America -- our own shared neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, whose problems trickle across the borders affecting our own school systems and neighborhoods...

Friedman is one of those global  Americans, whose policy preferences for bettering the whole world have had definite impact here at home.  Negative impacts, financially.  It's great to want to share, of course, but if it means abdicating our own leadership and moral standing to lower ourself to the level of Israel's ultimately non-effective military measures of the past decades (violence begets violence, repeat ad naseum) ... well, I suspect we'll be looking to China's more successful government system very soon to learn how to care for own own people.  Forced abortions and planned family sizes to cull the entitlement mentality?  We simply can't continue breeding the government-dependent citizens at rate we've been going, not with the productive taxpaying base disappearing rapidly.

Still, Friedman is thinking of that teenage girl in Jordan, who wants to start her very own leadership club in her hometown, much like when school is out, the Boys and Girls Clubs in our own country step in to supervise, feed processed foods, and ... provide opportunities to children whose own parents are unable to provide these services at home.

According to the Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2012, “Earning a fair wage and owning a home are now the two highest priorities for young people in the Middle East — displacing living in a democracy as the greatest aspiration of regional youth.” Democracy is now third. And no wonder. If you are not properly educated, you can’t get a decent job and buy an apartment — and, without that, you can’t get married. Record numbers of Arab youth today are still living with their parents after college. Indeed, 25 percent of all young Arabs ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. What makes this cohort so dangerous, though, is that they are the educated unemployed — who are not really educated. Most Arab state public schools score very low on the international math/reading comparisons, thanks to a system that asks students to take notes, spew back what they learned and pay for private tutoring from the same teachers after school if they want anything remotely better.

The dominant trend in the Arab world today remains “education for unemployment” rather than “education for employment,” said Mona Mourshed, an Egyptian-American who leads McKinsey’s global education practice. “You have a teaching method that is centuries old and a curriculum that does not support students with the competencies they need.” It takes the average employer in the Arab world nine months to train a new worker to be proficient. The single most popular thing the U.S. could do right now to support the Arab Spring is to identify six or seven specific fields of work — in light manufacturing, textiles, services, word processing, etc. — and establish education programs that can impart real skills for those jobs.

Hmmm.
He concludes:

If we don’t storm our own brains and redirect our Arab foreign aid to education for employment, we’ll forever be killing the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda.

Only if the American people stand for it.  Something tells me though, the American public has had its fill of trying to make the world safe for Israel.  If we can exploit our own natural gas resources and end our reliance on Middle East energy supplies, perhaps Friedman might be more successful in convincing the Israeli people that it is in their best interests to love their own neighbors now, and work for justice and equality for all peoples in their region.* 

Leave the American taxpayers, and our children, out of it.  We have needs here at home;  we are primarily U.S. not global jetsetting citizens, and our business is here at home, not exploiting new unsophisticated foreign markets for profit. 

I wonder if perhaps hiring an educated Arab to the editorial board might be necessary to teach that to the predominance of Jewish pundits at the Times, who are all very well meaning, I am sure.
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* I understand that even in these tight times worldwide, Israel's economy is booming.  Perhaps now might be a wise time to help them understand the American people cannot continue to spend our own tax dollars to protect them from the consequences of their own unilateral military actions, and they might indeed want to take the American Jew's advice to invest in people and peace, and not further targeted killings, settlement-building, land grabs, and unjust imprisonments.

I don't have much hope that the "teachers" will learn from their own past tragic history, but at least we can say they were given fair warning.  The buck, someday, will stop at our own borders, and eventually all will be called to account, not in shrouded secrecy either, on what they valued, what they invested in, and what the ultimate payoff was.  American independence -- despite some immoral episodes -- has stood the test of time.  We should allow our "little brother" Israel the opportunity to someday soon try to stand alone themselves, to decide if their brand of democracy is as strong as the rights all citizens here enjoy, regardless of their religious or ethic background.

We should have been using our American dollars all along to help educate Israel's Jews on how democracy really works, instead of adopting their "kill first, hold a trial later, if ever" brand of justice here.  We can talk till the cows come home about pushing this responsibility for peace, freedom and justice onto little girls in their little girl social clubs.

Or we can look in a mirror, Mr. Friedman, and ask ourselves:  Have I personally benefitted from injustice?  Have my values and policy prescriptions contributed to the injustice and killings of innocents?  Did I do more harm than good, as an outsider interfering into another people's religious, tribal and family practices?  Nevermind carving up their homelands and the arsenal of military products we've pumped into the region.

Since we've only the abundance of jet-setting, world-advising, book-selling Jewish-American columnists to advise us, with no Arab or Persian voices similarly represented, this woman asks:  When will the true changes come?  If not now, when?  If not our "leaders", then who?  The angry, uneducated children coming up who will inherit these injustices and ill-conceived values, and desperately unbalanced ledgers? 

That's an awfully big task to ask, don't you think, Mr. Friedman?
Back to the drawing board, because... after the brainstorms pass, it trickles down to the day-to-day workers, often soldiers and the lesser paid, to carry out these childlike fantasies that would have us forget past actions, pay off the right people, and lobby to continue this dangerous worldwide status quo.

We can't all  play at being victims to advance our own interests, afterall.  That falls to a very select, some say G-d chosen, set.  It's simply not in the majority of American DNA, as politically, I think we might be finally beginning to see...

ADDED:  A reader gently pushes back in the comments:

Mr. Friedman blithely states "..a U.S. drone had killed “the No. 2 man” in Al Qaeda. I am sure the world is a better place." what an abjectly ignorant and stupid statement, the same one used to ex-post-facto "justify" the insanity of the US attack on Iraq.

Wait until other countries get drones....

Lol.  So much for popular support for "death from above".  The bit about other countries obtaining similar technology and following our lead... I hope Friedman is listening.  The "Do Unto Others" spiel is found in the New Testament, not the Old, I believe, though I understand even Jewish law teaches that if you don't want actions taken against you and yours, you'd best not advocate them against even lesser others.

These pundits really aren't known for their foresight, as their championing America into costly and strategically ill-planned military excursions... over there in the past decade, has shown.  Doubt it's made Israel any safer or more secure in the long run, either.  Time will tell -- or show rather -- the results of so much snuffed out life and bloodshed for the survivors.  Actions have consequences afterall, even for the well meaning.
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Make it a great week out there, no matter what your work currently consists of or whose payroll you might be on.