FRONT PAGE MAG
by Ari Lieberman
November 18, 2014
Let us engage in a brief thought experiment. Imagine three US service members disembarking off their ship docked in the Israeli port of Haifa. They paint the town but are suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded by a group of 12 or so hooligans, who yell epithets at them, call them “murderers,” throw garbage at them, rough them up and then place bags over their heads. Imagine further that the hoodlums are caught and arrested by Israeli authorities but are inexplicably released shortly thereafter.
Let us engage in another thought experiment. Imagine that Israel, under the pretext of ensuring its security, dynamites eight-hundred “Palestinian” homes. The Israelis argue that smuggling tunnels under some of those homes warrant drastic action and announce their intention to construct a barrier where those homes once stood, displacing ten-thousand residents.
These two incidents actually occurred but not in Israel. On November 12, in a sickening display of brute thuggery, three US sailors in Istanbul were assaulted by a group of Turkish nationalists. They were roughed up, humiliated, had bags stuffed over their heads and chased to chants of “Yankee go home.”…..The second incident, involving the wonton destruction of some eight-hundred homes and the displacement of some ten-thousand residents occurred in the Egyptian controlled part of Rafah that straddles the border between Sinai and the Hamas enclave of Gaza. It seems that the Egyptians had had enough of Hamas’s shenanigans and decided to act resolutely……
Now let us return to our thought experiment. What was the State Department’s reaction to these two occurrences? In the latter example, there was simply no reaction, only silence. There were no condemnations from John Kerry, no claims by Jen Psaki that such drastic measures were disproportionate and no protests from Obama shills Ben Rhodes, Phillip Gordon and Josh Earnest that such sweeping actions amount to collective punishment, are a source of regional instability and present obstacles to peace…..It appears that the Obama administration, which treats friends like enemies and enemies like friends, has adopted one standard for Israel and another for the autocratic governments that surround it……
ArchitectGuy on Israel 