I once heard an old joke about an American tourist in Belfast during the Troubles. He suddenly feels a gun in his back and hears a voice ask him in a sweet Irish brogue, “Are ya Catholic, or are ya Protestant?”
The American, not deeply religious and keenly aware that either answer could get him killed, thinks for just a second. Then, he cries out: “I’m Jewish!”
“Ha, ha!” the voice replies with delight. “I must be the luckiest Palestinian in all of Ireland!”
That joke has to be at least as mind-numbingly irrelevant to the highly complex Middle Eastern conflict as President Joe Biden’s crude and reductive comments earlier today in Saudi Arabia, but at least it has the benefit of being amusing. Biden cannot make that claim for the fatuously simplistic analogy he made, apparently all in the service of making himself and his own heritage somehow relevant to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and peace process.
Biden said, “My background and the background of my family is Irish-American, and we have a long history, not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude to Irish Catholics over the years, for 400 years.”
At least he kept it relatively vague. But aside from the fact that each story features two groups of people who, over time, came to dislike each other intensely and have conflicts, it’s pretty hard to sustain the analogy between these two historical disputes. In fact, it is so simplistic that it is potentially offensive to all four of the nationalities he named.
And mind you, Biden didn’t have to say this. He was trying to make himself more relevant via his Irish heritage. It’s gross, and it smacks of pandering. Why not just stand back and show some humility — talk about how this is a conflict that has baffled minds much more acute than his own; that people have serious differences and complex motives that are not easy to discern or resolve.
This is a hallmark of all pandering. It bears some resemblance to first lady Jill Biden’s mistake in her now-infamous breakfast taco speech. You can impute to that idiocy any motive you like, but I firmly believe that she, too, was trying to take each of the Hispanic nationalities she mentioned and somehow put them into a context that fits into her own little world.
I like and know something about San Antonio breakfast tacos … therefore, it sounds like a good idea to bring them up in this speech. Brilliant!
I don’t think either Biden was being deliberately offensive or should be criticized as such. But is it too much to ask that politicians resist the narcissistic urge to take a much larger political situation and reduce it to make it all about themselves?
