Team Obama rightly blamed Iran after its proxy Hezbollah apparently blew up a bus in a terrorist operation that killed five Israelis. Then it went off the rails.
“This was tit for tat,” a State Department official told The New York Times, implying that the bombing was retaliation for Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
It’s worth unpacking this idea.
Tit: Israel reportedly bumps off the Iranian engineers, men working on a device that could incinerate the entire Middle East — Israel first.
Tat: Terrorists operating under orders from Iran blow up a bus full of young civilians on vacation at a Black Sea resort.
To blithely accept that equation is to acquiesce in moral equivalence at its most cynical.
And it says a great deal about the mind-set of the Obama administration.
In the State Department’s eyes, it’s all an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth — and the Iranians were merely reacting to Israel’s provocation. Israel, in a sense, touched off the slaughter of its own people.
Iran no doubt agrees — it calls those strikes on its scientists acts of terrorism.
But the Obama administration should know better. Conflating the two dishonors the dead — though it explains much about Obama’s relationship with living Israelis.
Make no mistake: Israel is fully justified in targeting the Iranian nuclear program. The world — and particularly the Arabs of the Middle East — owe it a great debt for doing so most aggressively.
But nothing excuses or explains Iran’s murder of innocents, and the Obama administration should stop doing what amounts to PR work for the ayatollahs.
That’s unacceptable.