PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced the appointment of Dr. Ran Baratz to the post of head of public diplomacy at the end of last week.
Since the announcement, we've seen another "Gal Hirsch style" take-down. It makes me wonder what is wrong with the guys leading our government that they can't get a simple appointment taken care of without such embarrassment. Do they not vet their candidates?
What happened? Briefly, it was discovered that Baratz had posted some not so nice comments about some important people to his Facebook account. He called Barak Obama the modern face of anti-semitism. He said Ruby Rivlin is a marginal figure the Islamic states have no interest in kidnapping. He said that John Kerry has the mental age of a 12 year old.
Ok, so he said what he said and there is a debate as to whether or not that makes him unworthy of the post he was being appointed to.
What I find noteworthy about this is a different aspect of this story.
Joe Biden, speaking at the Union for Reform Judaism conference, criticized the incident saying, "
there should be no tolerance for any member of the Israeli administration to refer to the president of the United States in derogatory terms, period."
Others, spokespeople, also related to the report criticizing the derogatory comments in harsh terms.
source: TOI
What makes this noteworthy is that when Obama was caught speaking into a hot mike calling Netanyahu a liar, no apology was forthcoming, nor did we hear anything about kindergarten rules of being polite. When Obama spoke about Netanyahu calling him a chickenshit and other names, kindergarten rules did not apply, and no apology was forthcoming...
They should perhaps consider another kindergarten rule - what goes around comes around.
Netanyahu ignored Obama's comments. Obama should ignore the comments of someone who was not even a staffer at the time.
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