Diplomacy

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CNN’s Tapper: Many Countries Voting against U.S. on Jerusalem Have “Questionable Records”

A number of countries supporting Thursday’s United Nations General Assembly vote against President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital have “questionable records of their own,” Jake Tapper said in a commentary during his show The Lead on CNN.

Tapper singled out critics such as Venezuela, Syria, Yemen and North Korea, all of whose citizens suffer from tyranny and war.

“The U.S. imperils global peace says the representative of Venezuela, a country in a humanitarian disaster,” Tapper observed. After noting that Venezuelans are suffering from widespread hunger, Tapper asked, “On what moral platform does the government of Venezuela stand today?”

Tapper also rejected criticism of the U.S. position on Jerusalem from Syria noting, “We’re in the seventh year of the brutal Syrian civil war that’s killed half a million people and displaced millions. Syrian President Bashar al Assad has used chemical weapons against his own citizens including children.”

Yemen, which along with Turkey drafted the resolution criticizing the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem, is “seemingly more focused at least during the speech on where the U.S. puts it’s embassy on Israel than on the 7 million Yemenis on the brink of starvation in that country’s civil war,” Tapper said.

Tapper acknowledged that not everything that the U.S. or Israel does is above criticism but “listening to these countries including North Korea and Myanmar and Turkey and China, lecturing the United States in any way about human rights and peace might seem a bit much.”

After that criticism, Tapper introduced, ” a bit of context that you might not know.” Citing UN Watch, Tapper noted that 83 of the 97 UN resolutions targeting a single country from 2012 to 2015 targeted Israel.

Tapper concluded the segment:

Now, certainly Israel is not above criticism, but considering the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the lack of basic human rights in North Korea, the children starving in the streets of Venezuela, the citizens of Syria targeted for murder by their own leader using the most grotesque and painful of weapons, you have to ask, is Israel truly deserving of 86 percent of the world’s condemnation? Or possibly is something else afoot at the United Nations? Something that allows the representative of the Assad government to lecture the United States for moving its embassy?

[Photo: CNN / YouTube]