http://sarahhonig.com/2014/03/28/another-tack-some-are-more-equal/
Speaking the truth can be a dangerous undertaking. It can expose the speaker to all sort of chastisement. This isn’t only so in any given country’s domestic affairs but very much so in relations between states.
Ours, after all, is a globalized reality. This fact can induce and intensify inordinate hubris in some leaders with pretensions to hold sway over more than their own specified domain. White House occupant and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barak Obama, for instance, often conducts himself as if the American electorate and the Nobel committee had put him in charge of the whole earth.
Had Obama been an unqualified success, his conceit may be suffered but his isn’t and he doesn’t like to hear that he isn’t.
Despite his resplendent liberal credentials, Obama’s concept of liberty is a tad constricted. Everyone – everywhere on the face of this planet and beyond – is perfectly free to go into raptures over him but it’s a whole different opera when not-so-flattering opinions are sounded.
Obama, his appointed sidekicks and salaried mouthpieces resent criticism. Plain and simple.
Quite clearly, the US president and secretary of state don’t subscribe to George Orwell’s ever-relevant observation that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
*Therefore, woe to the Quixotic sorts – both on America’s home turf and abroad – who insist on telling Obama and crew precisely what they’re loath to hear. Woe all the more to the recidivists who persist in upsetting the Obama administration’s omniscient ones.
Very obviously Israel’s defense minister Moshe Ya’alon is among the least stomached recidivists, even if he speaks his mind at closed meetings or in private conversations.
Ya’alon must come to grips with the fact that freedom of speech isn’t universally countenanced in our Obamaesque existence. Someone can be counted upon to leak or record uncomplimentary evaluations of the dear leader and then woe to him who dared tell it like he sees it.
The only way to avoid Obama’s self-righteous censure is to obsequiously shut up. Not to do so is imprudent in the extreme.
Nonetheless, Ya’alon keeps breaching the gag order that has been imposed on Israeli statesmen by Obama’s eminently ultra-liberal administration. Its honchos detest unfavorable analyses, which amounts to not wanting them voiced – not even behind closed doors.
Actually it’s not merely what is said but who says it. Restrictions on free speech especially apply to notable absentees from Obama’s list of favorites. Ya’alon most certainly is not featured on that list but a host of Iranian ayatollahs who harbor no inhibitions to stridently denounce America as the “Big Satan” are among the favorites who must never be called to order, no matter what.
Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (now in his tenth year of office as “president,” despite having supposedly been elected in 2005 to only a four-year term) can also rant as he pleases. No amount of mind-blowing mendacity, outright incitement, rampant terror-glorification, extraordinary distortion or in-your-face extortion will ever land this perpetual favorite in hot water.
Yet whatever bespectacled soft-spoken Ya’alon says is guaranteed to get him into scalding disfavor, even if he dares talk in camera. He presumably should curb his tongue even in the privacy of his bedroom, as is advisable for anyone of whom the White House so indignantly disapproves.
