McCain’s Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy on Crimea at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conferenc

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/hypocrisy-committee-conference.html

McCain’s Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy on Crimea at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conference
By Juan Cole | Mar. 5, 2014
John Hickman

That the Crimean Crisis would be exploited by Republican Congressional leaders to criticize President Obama was inevitable. Politics hasn’t stopped at the water’s edge in the United States for a very long time.

What wasn’t inevitable was the shamelessness of Senator John McCain’s denunciation of President Obama in a speech to the most powerful ethnic foreign policy lobby in Washington. In a March 4th address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Arizona Republican complained about a “feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.” Yet after insisting that Russian action in Crimea “must be made unacceptable to the world community,” all that he could offer as a policy response was the imposition of new economic sanctions. Oddly, he seemed to think it especially important that corrupt Russians be prevented from visiting Las Vegas.

If the empty bluster was merely pathetic what accompanied it was nauseating. McCain explained the Russian majority in Crimea as the result of Stalin’s mass expulsion of the ethnic Crimean Tatars. Yet he was speaking to an audience present to support Israel, a country with a Jewish majority made possible only by the mass expulsion of Palestinians. Both the Crimean and Palestinian expulsions took place at essentially the same historical moment, though Crimean Tatars retained rights of citizenship and Palestinians were mostly made stateless.

McCain fulminated about Russian annexation of Crimea and possibly of the Russian speaking eastern half of Ukraine. Yet he was speaking to an audience that had endorsed the annexation of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, and endorses the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Hypocrisy more complete would be difficult to conceive.