Melanie Philllips explains the
reason for the unprecedented rebuke to the Obama
administration over the Israel-bashing speech by US Secretary of State John
Kerry on Thursday this way:
“So why the screeching U-turn? Almost certainly it was because of the
ferocious pushback from both Israel and US President-elect Donald Trump which
presumably made Mrs May realise she had created a diplomatic crisis between the
UK and its two ostensible allies.”
Melanie Phillips is right, but there is an additional
reason, explained by Charles Krauthammer in his column:
“It’s the
third category of “settlement” that is the most contentious and that Security
Council Resolution 2334 explicitly condemns: East Jerusalem. This is not just scandalous; it’s absurd. America acquiesces to a declaration that, as a matter of international
law, the Jewish state has no claim on the Western Wall, the Temple Mount,
indeed the entire Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. They belong to Palestine.”
We have come to the point
where world animosity towards Israel has morphed into UN resolutions that have
become so absurd that this absurdity is the very proof that they are wrong.
From Wikipedia
In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction
to absurdity"; or argumentum ad absurdum, "argument to absurdity") is a form of
argument which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably
leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by
showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible
Almost everybody in the
West gets carried away by attacking Israel. It has become a Pavlovian reflex. However, logical thinking is still an important
component of western thought and when mathematical absurdity stares you in the
face even the dumbest take notice.
Reductio
ad absurdum works in math (Here is a link to why the square root of 2 is
irrational) . It works in politics too.
