Washington, August 10 – White House physicians announced today that they have determined President Barack Obama is affected by a condition that does not allow him to unequivocally support Israel’s right to defend its citizens. It instead forces him to qualify any statement that, without the qualification, would constitute an endorsement of that right.

For the last month the President has been unable to speak about Israel’s justified response to rocket fire and tunnel infiltration from the Gaza Strip without calling on the country to exercise “restraint” or “do more to prevent civilian casualties,” regardless of Israel’s already-unprecedented measures to minimize harm to noncombatants. On other occasions he has given validity to Hamas demands, ignoring the fact that those demands are geared toward perpetuating the organization’s ability to continue attacking Israeli civilians. Concerned with this recurring symptom, presidential doctors performed an MRI (Moral Relativism Indicator) scan, a test that confirmed a diagnosis of MEH (Moral Equivalency-Hypocrisy).

MEH disproportionately strikes college-educated adults in the western hemisphere, but is especially prevalent in the echelons of government and media, fields with a documented likelihood six times higher than the general population of being affected by a condition called Academia, which almost invariably precedes a MEH diagnosis, though the exact pathological cause has yet to be determined. Academia presents as a tendency to select or manufacture facts to suit a narrowly defined worldview but that claims to represent openness and tolerance.

“A normal patient would not be incapable of asserting that Israel has an obligation – not merely a right – to self-defense, and that the burden of so-called ‘restraint’ falls upon those who use civilians as weapons,” said Internal Medicine specialist Cuttutha Chase. “MEH impairs the president’s capacity to see with moral clarity, and he therefore feels compelled to place an equal burden on the warring sides instead of calling out evil and supporting good.”

Other heads of state have suffered the ailment to varying degrees, but the condition is by no means the exclusive province of presidents and prime ministers. Almost the entire roster of CNN and MSNBC, for example, treated the casualty count in Gaza as they might a football score, operating with the view that the more powerful party should be more “sportsmanlike” and less assiduous in pursuing a convincing result, regardless of Israel’s focus on eliminating threats to ts civilian population vs. Hamas’s focus on maximizing harm to civilians on both sides in order to paint it as Israel’s fault.

There is no known cure for the ailment, and the symptoms are only occasionally relieved by exposure to facts. Often those facts spark an even more severe episode of moral blindness as the body’s system attempts to preserve the distorted picture to which it has become accustomed.