Straining Every Nerve Against UN Membership for Palestine

[Purveyor]

by Josh Ruebner / August 9th, 2011

The Roman philosopher and politician Cicero urged orators to “Strain every nerve to gain your point.” The Obama Administration appears to have taken his advice to heart in its attempts to make the case that the United States should oppose Palestinian efforts to gain membership in the United Nations this fall.

However, its rhetoric has been so convoluted, its logic so flawed, and its reasoning so shoddy that its efforts have been desultory and unconvincing. Take, for example, the following quotes:

No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state. And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum. (Applause.) Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate.

— President Barack Obama, Remarks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, May 22, 2011

There are so many historical inaccuracies, deliberate obfuscations of political realities, and hyperbolic assumptions that it is difficult to know where to begin to unpack these three crucial sentences.

MORE...

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/08/straining-every-nerve-against-un-membership-for-palestine/

[Jefferson23]

1. I have never read this before, from the OP:

In 1949, former Senator John Sherman Cooper, serving as U.S. Representative to the UN General Assembly “recalled that his government had declared that it had no intention of preventing, by its vote, the admission to the United Nations of any applicant which received at least seven affirmative votes in the Security Council, which meant that the United States would not use its right of veto in the Security Council on any membership application.”



Important to know, thanks for posting.

[dtexdem]

2. The U.S. has dishonored itself over Israel as long as the latter has existed.

And it takes a lot of nerve for a settler nation like the U.S., created on and engorged by land theft and genocide (as well as slavery) to get on its moral high horse to defend a more-recent settler nation (created on and engorged by land theft, much murder, and mass oppression).

[leveymg]

3. The US is almost irrelevant to the outcome of that vote in the UNGA

We've made ourselves irrelevant within that body on this issue by our continued embrace of the Israeli Right-wing.

On the other hand - I know that that Obama has a very good pragmatic reason for statements like these. We embrace the Israeli Right-wing because they are like our small, very frightened, hysterical child who clutches a large-caliber, loaded handgun inside a crowded subway car.