Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Throwing Israel under the bus: Secretary John Kerry's speech an exercise in anti-Israel spin

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan


Spin Team: President Obama, Secretary John Kerry, Ambassador Power, Ben Rhodes
With less than three weeks left in office Secretary of State John Kerry made a speech to “address" what a senior State Department official described as "some of the misleading critiques” directed at the Obama administration by the Israeli Prime Minister. What took place today was predictable because it was a continuation of the last eight years. 

Foreign policy in the Obama Administration is an exercise in spin divorced from reality that has been manufactured by a sycophantic press repeating White House talking points. Sound extreme? “We created an echo chamber,” said President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes in The New York Times on May 5, 2016 describing the national media as follows: “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” Rhodes explained in the same interview that policy is not determined by rational discussion and that “[i]n the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this." They did it in Cuba, in Iran and now with Israel developing messages and tactics that could drive public opinion whether or not they were backed up by the facts. 

This is not the path to preserving and defending the American Republic but to subverting and turning it into an Orwellian dystopia. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, understood the importance of facts and truth in a public debate and suffered greatly for his truth telling but he was and remains an American statesmen to be emulated. Secretary of State John Kerry who disgraced himself today in a speech criticizing Israel's democracy as having "extreme elements" while months earlier legitimizing General Raul Castro, calling the communist dictator "President" in Cuba is sadly the antithesis of Senator Moynihan.

Forty one years ago Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan addressed the United Nations General Assembly and defended Israel in 1975. Contrast Moynihan's speech with Secretary Kerry's today
and one understands the depths of the Secretary of State's failure. The Obama Administration's foreign policy has been a failure that oversaw the rise of ISIS, greater instability across North Africa and blood baths in Syria and Iran as instability increased in the Middle East. Now the White House wants to scapegoat Israel and blame this mess on the only democracy in the Middle East.


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