Last night I listened to Anderson Cooper on CNN as he analyzed the Netanyahu speech at the UN. He asked if Netanyahu had naively bitten Ahmadinejad’s bait, and he introduces an excerpt where Netanyahu appears to angrily overreach by attacking every member of the UN for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, saying:
I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?
My immediate reaction as I listened to this edited piece was, man, this is dumb. Netanyahu should not attack all members of the UN. After all, the body at the UN is designed for ALL nations – even those ruled by oppressive regimes – to have a forum to speak (as David Gergen explained, pointing to Netanyahu’s moral clarity but criticizing him for not recognizing this). And how dare Netanyahu say he represents all the Jewish people? I don’t think he represents me – certainly not on how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But something felt wrong. I may disagree with him on many policy issues but Netanyahu is a smart man with strong diplomatic and public speaking skills. Was this the real story?
So today I read the entire transcript of Netanyahu’s speech. And I was shocked at how bad CNN/Anderson Cooper had framed the issue! I’ve written about how FOX over-does the spin in the right-wing direction. But CNN and Cooper should be embarrassed about how they handled this. And one of my favorite commentators and real statesmen – David Gergen (perhaps the only excellent one left among dozens of mini-opinionators) probably did not even listen to the speech in full, and certainly did not frame things clearly. The other commentator (Reza Ezlan?) was way way off.
Here is a quote within context from Netanyahu’s speech:
Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.
But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!
Now, of course that in the age of twitter, you need to keep things brief. But Cooper/CNN could have easily introduced the segment of Netanyahu by explaining that he criticized not the entire UN audience, but those who stayed to listen to Ahmadinejad. Denying even monsters like Ahmadinejad the podium is not an option at the UN. But every nation has a right to get up and walk out – to exercise its right not to be subjected to his vitriolic hate-mongering, and this was a valid position for Netanyahu to take.
With this post I do not mean to endorse all of Netanyahu’s foreign policy positions – quite the opposite, in some areas I feel he harms Israeli and Palestinian interests alike. But as a student of the media, following on my prior post about editorial spin, I am yet again alarmed at how dangerous unchecked news sources can be. Indeed, a big part of why the Middle East and the world are in the shape they are is because partisan media feeds each audience what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear, and they don’t constructively engage audiences to better understand each other.
For students of oratory and for students of history, Netanyahu’s speech is actually constructed extremely well, and will probably become a historical piece that others will study for decades. The transcript is provided below in full for those who want to examine it for themselves:
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