This US writer has triggered a never-ending controversy, as some people say that he was the father of the entire Arab Initiative and that the latter was an echo of one of his provocative articles. His meeting with a high-up Arab official was a sort of direct cause of this initiative, which was adopted at the Arab Summit in Beirut and was not attributed to any specific country, as it expressed a general Arab stance. This stance has become a slogan on everyone's lips. Some people would like the Arabs to press ahead with it, while others would like them to get rid of it in light of Israel's continuous crimes and its carnage in Gaza. Thomas Friedman is an American columnist and author of four famous books. The first was "From Beirut to Jerusalem" (1989) followed by "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" (1999), while the most important one is "The World Is Flat" (2005). I first met this controversial writer almost 15 years ago, when the World Economic Forum in Davos invited me at the end of January 1995 to talk about religion and politics in the Middle East at the forum's inaugural session. That day, Mr. Zalman Shoval, an Israeli member of the Likud Party, phoned me and invited me to an intellectual meeting during one of those evenings in Davos along with several senior intellectuals from across the world. That evening, I met Mr. Thomas Friedman for the first time. He was a star in US journalism through his famous column and his anti-Arabs stances, which reflected his being Jew. I met Mr. Friedman again some years later, when he visited Cairo and asked to meet me. He came to my office at the People's Assembly and spent a long time with me talking deeply about the Arab Initiative, Egypt's role and the region's future. He told me that the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 had been for the Americans as if the Holy Kaaba had been bombarded for Muslims. I was surprised by this strange comparison and I felt as if we were accused of being extremists not only intellectually, but also in another similarly influential way. I must admit that Thomas Friedman is not like other prominent anti-Arabs and Muslims journalists. In fact, he understands the region and has been following up on the Arab-Israeli conflict from its different aspects. He is also very clever, which enables him to make exciting confrontations and mix cards when necessary. He also loves launching political balloons to test and follow people's reactions, hoping to be able to understand more deeply the Arab personality and make a favor to his country and Israel. In spite of his fame, sometimes he intentionally disappears due to his way of thinking and expressive capacity. He came to Cairo one more time invited by the Economic Forum and he met several intellectuals, including me. I liked his deep thoughts about issues as well as his unconventional way to expose his ideas and incite his interlocutor to listen carefully to him and reply objectively. This objectivity is indeed something his interlocutor may usually lack because of his political tendencies and intellectual mindset. Over the past two decades, he has had exceptional ideas on the international and regional arenas. He foresaw the Arab initiative in one of his articles before it was issued at a summit held in an important Arab capital. Such initiative, though, was eventually attributed to the Arabs as a whole and not to Thomas Friedman and his intelligence school.
