Iran 's foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif used the tactic in the Zurich Security Conference on February 17 , 2019 . When pressed by BBC ’s Lyse Doucet about eight environmentalists imprisoned in his country , he mentioned the killing of Jamal Khashoggi . Doucet picked up the fallacy and said " let ’s leave that aside . " The philosopher Merold Westphal said that only people who know themselves to be guilty of something " can find comfort in finding others to be just as bad or worse . " Whataboutery , as practiced by both parties in The Troubles in Northern Ireland to highlight what the other side had done to them , was " one of the commonest forms of evasion of personal moral responsibility , " according to Bishop ( later Cardinal ) Cahal Daly . After a political shooting at a baseball game in 2017 , journalist Chuck Todd criticized the tenor of political debate , commenting , " What-about-ism is among the worst instincts of partisans on both sides . " Whataboutism usually points the finger at a rival 's offenses to discredit them , but , in a reversal of this usual direction , it can also be used to discredit oneself while one refuses to critique an ally . During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign , when '' The New York Times '' asked candidate Donald Trump about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 's treatment of journalists , teachers , and dissidents , Trump replied with a criticism of U.S. history on civil liberties . Writing for '' The Diplomat '' , Catherine Putz pointed out : " The core problem is that this rhetorical device precludes discussion of issues ( ex : civil rights ) by one country ( ex : the United States ) if that state lacks a perfect record . " Masha Gessen wrote for '' The New York Times '' that usage of the tactic by Trump was shocking to Americans , commenting , " No American politician in living memory has advanced the idea that the entire world , including the United States , was rotten to the core . " Joe Austin was critical of the practice of whataboutism in Northern Ireland in a 1994 piece , '' The Obdurate and the Obstinate '' , writing : " And I 'd no time at all for ' What aboutism ' ... if you got into it you were defending the indefensible . " In 2017 , '' The New Yorker '' described the tactic as " a strategy of false moral equivalences " , and Clarence Page called the technique " a form of logical jiu-jitsu " . Writing for '' National Review '' , commentator Ben Shapiro criticized the practice , whether it was used by those espousing right-wing politics or left-wing politics ; Shapiro concluded : " It 's all dumb . And it 's making us all dumber . " Michael J. Koplow of Israel Policy Forum wrote that the usage of whataboutism had become a crisis ; concluding that the tactic did not yield any benefits , Koplow charged that " whataboutism from either the right or the left only leads to a black hole of angry recriminations from which nothing will escape "
political shooting at a baseball game in 2017
2017 Congressional baseball shooting
Whataboutism