John Kerry: Michael Oren’s assessment

If you want to understand the perverse foreign policy of the Obama administration, Michael Oren’s memoir Ally is in invaluable text. It provides a first-hand account of Obama’s dishonesty and deceit toward Israel while his administration worked toward an arrangement facilitating the Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons while funding it terroristic pursuits.

It’s hard to come up with an innocent explanation, or at least one that is not stupefying. Once the arrangement was achieved in the form of the JCPOA, the administration lied about it nonstop with the assistance of its media adjunct.

Oren is Israel’s former ambassador to the United States. He drew on his personal experience for the memoir. He draws on it again to comment on John Kerry’s denial of the conversation related by Mohammad Javad Zarif regarding Kerry’s disclosure of Israeli actions in Syria reported by the New York Times this week. Dmitriy Shapiro sought out Oren for this JNS story on the assessment of former Israeli ambassadors on the Kerry/Zarif matter:

Oren cited Kerry’s speech in 2016 after failed Israel-Palestine peace negotiations, where he spent more than an hour lecturing Israel on its settlements while war was raging out of control in neighboring Syria.

“At the same time when Syrian [President] Bashar Assad was killing a half million of his own countrymen and the U.S. government refused to intervene, Kerry found time to give an hour-long speech condemning Israeli settlements,” said Oren. “What was going on north of [Israel] was the largest massacre in post-World War II history.”

The speech was especially puzzling, Oren pointed out since Kerry blamed Israel alone for the failure of the peace talks.

Oren said that he didn’t know whether Zarif was telling the truth in the recording, but it was well known during the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal Kerry and Zarif had a close relationship, something that troubled Israel.

“He made no attempts to disguise that,” said Oren. “And for Israelis, this was very disturbing. This was the representative of a government that was sworn to destroy us—actively seeking to destroy us. It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t just rhetoric.

“That’s disturbing to the Israelis and should have been disturbing for Americans because this is a regime that oppresses gay people and free speech, and imprisons people and tortures people. I mean, it should have been more disturbing for a person, I think, of a liberal outlook such as John Kerry.”

As the Biden/Harris administration retakes the path of accommodation with Iran, there is sure to be more to come. In the meantime, I want to add Oren’s comments to my own own assessment with high confidence that Kerry is lying.

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