How can Thomas Friedman be regarded as an expert on the Middle East?
From his latest diarrhoea:

And I mean madness. We've seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we've seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we've seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we've seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we've seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.

According to the wise man, the Israelis "retaliate", "at times", whereas the Moslems...

No doubt the 700 civilians killed by the Israelis in Lebanon are all accidents.

Friedman sees "hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses" but not the thousands of Palestinians killed during the same period by Israeli, US supplied weapons. He does not see the tens of thousands of Palestinians made homeless. He does not see the millions having their lives made hell by a 40 year occupation.

He forgets the tens of thousands killed in Lebanon in previous Israeli invasions.

He forgets to mention the 10s (maybe 100s) of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans killed by US and UK forces in Bush's war of terror.

No, all he sees is Moslem attrocities and Israeli accidents, all caused by lack of modernity of them thar Arbs.