Kerry’s False Moral Equivalence

The Fellowship  |  December 29, 2016

Secretary Kerry standing at a podium as he says his remarks at the UN Commencement Ceremony in NYC.

When John Kerry spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this week, he concentrated on Israel, while neglecting to attack Palestinian violence, incitement, and terror. Writing at JNS, Stephen M. Flatow says that Kerry understands neither the conflict nor the difference between right and wrong:

Kerry, like all blame-Israel-firsters, cannot accept the simple fact that, in this conflict, the Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are the bad guys. That’s not to say that Israel is perfect; of course not. America was not perfect in the 1940s, either. But any reasonable person could understand that the U.S. and its allies were the good guys, and Nazi Germany and its partners were the bad guys.

Kerry and the rest of the Obama administration see the world differently. They will not acknowledge that Israel is the victim, and the Palestinians are the aggressors. They will not recognize the difference between democratic, freedom-loving Israel and the totalitarian, terror-promoting PA regime.

So in his speech Wednesday, Kerry recalled visiting Kiryat Shemonah, near Israel’s northern border, and he acknowledged that children there “have 15 seconds to reach bomb shelters.” But he couldn’t just leave it at that. He had to try to show that Palestinian children have similar experiences. So he quickly talked about visiting Gaza and seeing Arab children “in the rubble of bombed-out buildings.”

That kind of superficial equivalence is outrageous because it is so fundamentally wrong. The Israeli children are the innocent victims of Arab terrorists—and the Palestinian children are also the innocent victims of Arab terrorists. The only reason their buildings are in rubble is because their elected ruler, Hamas, deliberately provokes Israeli strikes by raining thousands of rockets down on Israeli cities…

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