A Tale of Two Speeches

I can’t find where it comes from (maybe a reader can help me out), but there is a saying: “may mine enemy write a book.”

So too sometimes with speeches.

Last week, President Obama delivered remarks before the friendly confines of the National Prayer Breakfast. Undoubtedly, his purposes was to promote ecumenical tolerance and, perhaps, critical reflection in the tradition of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Citing the Crusades and the Inquisition as well as U.S. slavery and segregation, he cautioned Christians not “to get on our high horse” in blaming Islam for the recent excesses of Islamist terrorists. Some people took the speech in the benign spirit Obama intended, but others saw in it a ham-handed exercise in moral equivalency and historical anachronism. Whoever is right, the speech undeniably has had a divisive, further polarizing effect.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hasn’t yet given his Speech which, however, has already become a cause célèbre. Some analogies come my mind. In 1940, Monty Wooley—“The Beard”—starred in The Many Who Came to Dinner, breaking his leg in his hosts’ house where, immobilized, he becomes a voluble outspoken pain in the derriere. Is Netanyahu in a very different context threatening to become something similar?

Then there is also the contrast with “The Speech”—that’s what Ronald Reagan’s set delivery unifying conservatives and Republicans on the way to the presidency was called—and Netanyahu’s already divisive speech.

Rob Eshman in these pages has already offered incisive political analysis of how Netanyahu’s Speech—regardless of its content—threatens the support from liberal Democrats that is already “the soft underbelly” of the pro-Israel coalition in this country. I agree with Eshman. Yet having said this, I still think that criticisms—which now include former ADL head Abe Foxman—focusing almost exclusively on Netanyahu leave out the ominous context not only involving the Iran nuclear threat but enemies of Israel in this country.

Once again to go literary, Hamlet apologizes to Laertes: “I have shot mine arrow o'er the house, And hurt my brother.” Netanyahu may be shooting himself, but that doesn’t mean that he—like Hamlet—doesn’t have enemies that malign his motives and misinterpret his words.

No doubt many people are sincere about wanting Netanyahu just to reschedule his speech, but I suspect that many others in this country, in Europe, and in Israel just want Netanyahu to shut up about Iran so as not to offend Obama. And they will attack him, fair or foul, on matters of style while ignoring substance, to accomplish this.

I cannot resist drawing one more analogy: Czech President Edward Beneš before during, and after the 1938 Munich Conference. For defending his little country from dissolution by international consensus, he was defamed, browbeaten, and ultimately forced to resign not only by Hitler but by Chamberlain and Daladier. Lord Halifax was so vexed by Beneš that he wrote that he hoped that Hitler would solve the Sudeten problem “by force if necessary.” More moderately, a British diplomat warned Beneš: “it was vital for Czechoslovakia to accept great sacrifices and even if necessary considerable risks.”

The repetition of this disastrous mindset in today’s Middle East is what Netanyahu is speaking up against—even if he has chosen the wrong time and place.