Civility Watchdog: Obama Can't Set Policy on Israel or the Moon

Rock n' roller Gene Simmons has this to say about President Barack Obama's position on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations:

"If you've never been to the Moon, you can't issue policy about the Moon. You have no f***ing idea what it's like on the Moon. For a president to be sitting in Washington, DC, and saying, 'Go back to your '67 borders in Israel', how about you live there, and try to defend an indefensible border, nine miles wide? ... It's a nice idea -- when you grow up, you find out that life isn't the way you imagined it, and President Obama means well. I think he's actually a good guy. He has no f***ing idea what the world is like because he doesn't have to live there."

Simmons -- who was born in Israel -- is arguing that you can't set policy regarding something unless you're an expert in it, which in foreign policy means living there. This kind of reasoning is not valid -- it's known as the argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) -- since experts can be wrong and non-experts can be right. In fact, experts often disagree, meaning at least some of the must be mistaken. Notably, there are lots of different positions among Israelis regarding peace negotiations. And how did JFK set policy to land on the Moon, since he'd never gone there?

More, Simmons is engaging in name-calling, deriding Obama as someone who hasn't grown up and doesn't know what the real world is like. It's one thing to say Obama's positions on Israel-Palestine are flawed: It's been an intractable problem for decades, and it's reasonable for people to disagree about it. But to deride Obama as being divorced from reality and as having no business whatsoever setting any policy for Israel -- or the hundred or so other countries Obama has never lived in -- is derogatory and bad reasoning.