We weren’t expecting a Christmas miracle to come so early, but a full five days before the holiday, we got to see none other than CNN’s Jake Tapper stand up for the United States and, more specifically, the Trump administration on his program. In an unprecedented moment that seems destined for the television hall of fame, Tapper blasted the nations that voted to condemn the U.S. for moving its official embassy to Jerusalem.
“Remember yesterday, how United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said the U.S. would be taking names of countries that supported a resolution critical of the Trump Administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital?” Tapper asked.
He delivered the bad news: 128 countries chose to ignore that warning and vote against the U.S. in a vote on Thursday. Only 9 countries ultimately voted to stand beside us, raising the ire of the Trump administration and, unexpectedly, fueling Tapper’s anger as well.
“Among the 128 countries that voted to condemn the U.S. on this issue were some countries with some rather questionable records of their own,” Tapper noted. “‘The U.S. imperils global peace,’ says the representative of Venezuela, a country in a humanitarian disaster with violence in the streets, an economy in complete collapse; citizens malnourished and children being turned away from hospitals; starving families joining street gangs to scrounge for food. On what moral platform does the government of Venezuela stand today?”
Whoa! Condemnation of the socialist Venezuelan paradise on CNN? But Tapper wasn’t even done! He went on to slam Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and China for daring to criticize the United States from a claimed platform of peace, stability, and human rights. This is the kind of moral sensibility we’re used to seeing from Fox News, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a CNN host speak with this sort of clarity. And he wrapped up his argument with a point about the UN General Assembly that CNN viewers were probably surprised to hear.
“According to U.N. Watch, which monitors the United Nations, the United Nations general Assembly, from 2012 through 2015, has adopted 97 resolutions specifically criticizing an individual country, and of those 97, 83 of them have focused on Israel. That is 86%,” he said. “Now certainly Israel is not above criticism, but considering the genocide of the Rohinga 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% of the world’s condemnation?
“Or possibly,” he continued, “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?”
A remarkable moment for Tapper and CNN. It doesn’t quite make up for the avalanche of fake, biased news they spewed this year, but we’ll take what we can get.
Comments are closed.