Joe Biden and the Kinsleyan Gaffe

There's a reason why things go better for Joe Biden when he plagiarizes words from Neil Kinnock -- when he tries to come up with his own, he gets himself in a lot of trouble:

Vice President Joe Biden apologized to the United Arab Emirates Sunday for charging that the oil-rich ally had been supporting al Qaida and other jihadi groups in Syria's internal war, his second apology in as many days to a key participant in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State extremists.

The White House said Biden telephoned Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi to say that his recent remarks “regarding the early stages” of the conflict in Syria “were not meant to imply that the Emirates had facilitated or supported” the Islamic State, al Qaida or other extremist groups in Syria.

But his apology, one day after expressing similar regrets to Turkey, left open whether the Emirates had supported the rise of al Qaida during the early stages of the war in Syria.

In some respects, this is what's known as a Kinsleyan Gaffe, because there is evidence that ISIS/ISIL/IceIceBaby gets a lot of their money from the Sunni oil sheiks:

How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.

In Mosul, Shia shrines and mosques have been blown up, and in the nearby Shia Turkoman city of Tal Afar 4,000 houses have been taken over by Isis fighters as "spoils of war". Simply to be identified as Shia or a related sect, such as the Alawites, in Sunni rebel-held parts of Iraq and Syria today, has become as dangerous as being a Jew was in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe in 1940.

It may be true that the UAE itself has not supported these Sunni jihadis, but plenty of their pals have. Back to the original report from McClatchy:

The other two countries Biden named were Saudi Arabia, which is about to host the U.S.-funded training of thousands of Syrian rebel fighters, and Qatar, which houses a covert CIA training facility for Syrian rebels.

Biden said Saudi Arabia “has stopped the funding” going to extremists in Syria, and the Qataris “have cut off their support for the most extreme elements of the terrorist organizations.” Neither country has publicly demanded an apology so far.

Although senior U.S. officials have hinted that at least one Gulf country had been supporting Jabhat al Nusra, the Al Qaida-backed militia in Syria, no one had named the countries in a public forum until Biden. His remarks raised a number of questions: what form did the aid take, how long did it continue and what impact did it have on fighting on the ground?

All good questions. But we aren't supposed to talk about any of it, apparently.