viewpoint: ben cohen

Again, Kerry falls for the Big Lie

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There’s no stoppin’ the cretins from hoppin’,” sang the legendary Ramones, in one of their two-minute barnstormers that enters my head every time I see Secretary of State John Kerry getting on a plane. And never more than when his destination is Israel.

If Kerry receives a frosty welcome in the Jewish state, it shouldn’t come as a shock, at least not to someone capable of empathizing with the ugly situation Israelis are currently facing. Part of the anger lies in the moral equivalence that Kerry’s State Department has molded to explain a deadly explosion of Palestinian violence that is motivated by pure hatred of Jews.

Sometimes that’s been done in ways that are both insulting and incompetent, as when, on Oct. 15, Kerry’s State Department tweeted that the secretary had addressed “the tragic, outrageous attacks on civilians in Israel and the West Bank.” Nothing wrong with that, you might say, except that two minutes later, the tweet was deleted, and then rewritten with the words “tragic” and “outrageous” removed.

Then there was the frankly pathetic echoing of the false Palestinian claim that, as Kerry put it in a Harvard University speech (in remarks that were later awkwardly walked back), “There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years and there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.”

The actual data confirms that the reverse is true: From 2009 to 2014, an average of 1,554 housing units were constructed in the West Bank each year, a marked decline on the previous several years, and connected in the main to natural population growth.

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