The Theater of Absurdity: Trump’s Envoys Land in the Wrong Country!

 

CAN YOU FIND ISRAEL?

When the financiers of terror sit undisturbed in Qatar and Turkey, and the lectures are delivered in Jerusalem, the world has turned moral clarity into a diplomatic crime.

There are moments in history when the theater of politics becomes so absurd that even satire bows out, muttering, “I can’t compete with reality.” This is one of those moments. President Trump — self-anointed dealmaker, lover of spectacle, and self-proclaimed “friend of Israel” — is once again dispatching his emissaries, not to the sponsors of Hamas terror, not to the architects of October 7’s bloodshed, but to Israel itself.

One stands bewildered.

Why send envoys to Jerusalem, when the real puppeteers sit comfortably in Doha and Ankara? Why rebuke the patient, while ignoring the infection?

Qatar bankrolls Hamas — proudly, openly, even ostentatiously — hosting its leaders in five-star suites as they sip imported espresso and order more rockets for Gaza. Turkey, under Erdoğan, has turned its once-proud republic into a megaphone for Islamist rage, giving Hamas legitimacy as “freedom fighters.” These two nations don’t hide their intentions. They celebrate them.

And yet, it is Israel that receives the envoys, the lectures, the “urging of restraint.” Israel — still burying its dead, still retrieving the kidnapped, still patching the holes in its soul — is told to “show moderation.”
Moderation to whom?

To Hamas, which executed families and burned babies? To the sponsors who cheered it on?

One remembers the old Biblical pattern: the prophets were never sent to the nations who sinned, but to Israel, who could be rebuked. The nations never listen, and Israel, being moral, always listens too much. The modern prophets wear tailored suits and speak from press podiums, but the old script remains.

The bewilderment deepens when one recalls Trump’s boasts — that he was the “most pro-Israel president in history,” the architect of the Abraham Accords, the man who moved the embassy to Jerusalem. But in this new act of political theater, his envoys treat Israel not as an ally under siege, but as a misbehaving child in need of supervision.

Where are the envoys to Qatar, to demand the expulsion of Hamas’s politburo?

Where are the envoys to Turkey, to confront Erdoğan’s poisonous embrace of jihadist rhetoric?

Where are the sanctions, the diplomatic cold shoulders, the grandstanding that Trump so loves to perform when it suits his ego?

Perhaps the answer lies not in diplomacy but in vanity. Sending envoys to Qatar wins no votes. 

Confronting Turkey risks oil, trade, and complications with NATO. But pressuring Israel? That’s the easy applause line. It looks “balanced,” it sounds “presidential,” and it costs nothing politically. The irony is bitter — and so typically American.

Trump’s envoys should be landing in Doha, not Tel Aviv. They should be speaking to the financiers of terror, not the defenders of civilization. But perhaps that’s too much to expect from a world where moral courage is inversely proportional to global influence.

So the bewilderment remains.

REPUBLISHED: 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-theater-of-absurdity-trumps-envoys-land-in-the-wrong-country/

 

 From Tablet:

"President Trump's Middle East emissaries were chatting with Lesley Stahl, and, like a modern day Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, delivered a few perfect deadpan howlers. As Park Macdougald reported in The Scroll:

 

Our favorite was Witkoff's claim that to convince Hamas to disarm, the United States would be arranging a "weapons buyback program"—a ludicrous proposal made even funnier by its association with decades of Democratic Party domestic gun control efforts. (If it's too hard to buy back assault rifles from Steve in Waycross, Georgia, try convincing Abu Jihad in Gaza City.) Kushner was less ridiculous but possibly more misguided. "The success or failure of this will be if Israel and this international mechanism is able to create a viable alternative [to Hamas]. If they are successful, Hamas will fail, and Gaza will not be a threat to Israel in the future," Kushner said during the interview. "You can't replace a corrupt government with another corrupt government."

 

How to react to such blatant bulls***? Maybe a quote from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations can come in handy: "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

 

It's Tablet's literary editor David Samuels's favorite quote from the great Roman, and in a blockbuster essay in Tablet today, Samuels tracks the insanity that is crippling so much of the west and keeping it from recognizing simple truths that would have been self-evident to westerners from Aurelius onwards. He writes:

 

I am not a fan of killing babies. On the other hand, as a person who exists in the world, I accept the death of innocent people, children included, as part of the observable world of cause and effect, which is at best only partially amenable to human control. That belief hardly makes me a monster. In fact, it makes me a normal citizen of any civilized order I might name, whether Roman, Christian, Muslim or Enlightenment Europe. It is true however, that some individual human decisions may tilt the odds in favor of less fortunate outcomes. For example, if you choose to cross the border of your enemy and murder over 1,100 people in the most barbaric ways imaginable, your life is very likely forfeit, as are the lives of your family members and neighbors—not to mention the leaders of the states that trained you and funded your attack. To believe otherwise would be to license barbarism, which historically didn't work out too well for Rome or any other empire that tried it."