While Donald Trump does not directly come into this tale, his casual disruption of international relations and haphazard approach to our nuclear arsenal definitely seem to be stirring something in world leaders everywhere. The New York Times reports that Pakistan’s defense minister. Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a very defensive tweet on Friday, warning Israel that Pakistan has nuclear arms in their arsenal, stating, “Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh.Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too AH.”
According to the NYT, this tweet was supposedly a response to a post on fake news site awdnews.com:
That story, with the typo-laden headline “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack,” appeared on the website on Dec. 20, alongside articles with headlines like “Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump.”
The fake story about Israel even misidentified the country’s defense minister, attributing quotations to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon. Israel’s current minister of defense is Avigdor Lieberman.
The Israeli Defense Ministry responded on Twitter to clarify, writing, “The statement attributed to fmr Yaalon re Pakistan was never said,” and “Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false.” So far, Asif hasn’t deleted his statement.
The future of diplomacy is on Twitter and it doesn’t look good.
