Rabbi and Israel advocate Shmuley Boteach says his written apology to National Security Adviser Susan Rice, published Tuesday in The Washington Post, will hopefully steer a critical foreign policy conversation away from personalities and back to the genocidal threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.
"I don't want to be a distraction and I don't want to be the issue," Boteach, a prolific author and media personality popularly known as "America's Rabbi," told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Wednesday. "I want the focus to be clearly on Iran."
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Boteach found himself virtually alone last week in his original criticism of Rice, who
he called "blind" to genocide in a full-page newspaper advertisement timed to a U.S. visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Boteach last week said the ad was a response to Rice criticizing Netanyahu. The Israeli leader was preparing to speak to Congress and request that Americans not support a nuclear deal with Iran being brokered by the Obama administration.
But Jewish groups and Netanyahu himself repudiated the Boteach ad as an unwarranted personal attack.
Boteach last week apologized generally for what he called a poor choice of words. He addressed Rice by name this week with his op-ed for the Post, written as a letter of apology.
"I'm not the issue, and my ego's not the issue, and if I did something wrong I have to confess it and make it right," Boteach said on Wednesday. "The issue is Iran. The issue is a genocide against the Jewish people. The issue is the spiritual leader of their government,
who tweeted that Israel has no cure except to be annihilated.
"The issue is a government that sponsors more terrorism than any other in the world," said Boteach, adding that "one Holocaust was quite enough, and
now we're being threatened with a second."
"So I have to communicate my message," he said. "I don't retract the message. All of us have a blind spot to genocide, which is why there were so many — I list the eight or nine genocides in the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century, in that Washington Post column.
"And the United States government, which is now in negotiations with Iran that will allow them a very significant and highly dangerous nuclear infrastructure, needs to get serious about not appeasing this government," said Boteach. "I don't retract from that at all."
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