by Joseph Klein
Her latest hypocritical tirade against the Trump administration.
Susan Rice, former President Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations, has penned another one of her self-righteous columns for the New York Times. This op-ed is entitled “Trump’s Autocratic Friends.” Ms. Rice accused the Trump administration of abdicating American moral leadership by refusing to criticize “obvious human rights abuses.” The trigger for her tirade was her belief that the Trump administration failed to side adequately with Canada in its dispute with Saudi Arabia regarding Saudi Arabia’s imprisonment of prominent human rights and women’s rights activists. “The president tolerates Saudi abuses instead of defending Canada,” Ms. Rice wrote. “This is the hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to violations of human rights, particularly when committed by autocratic friends.” The Trump administration, she added, “conveyed to Saudi Arabia and others that they can commit abuses without a word of concern, much less condemnation, from Washington.” She then lumped Israel together with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in claiming that the Trump administration “has rolled over and played dead while they do whatever they please.”
Sorry Ms. Rice, but you doth protest too much. It was your boss, not President Trump, who rolled over for autocrats in the Middle East while throwing the only real democracy in the Middle East, Israel, under the bus.
Amnesty International criticized Obama’s “public silence on Saudi Arabian human rights” during his trip to the Saudi kingdom in 2014. “There was no open mention of the Saudi crackdown on peaceful political activists, a crackdown that brands anyone who speaks out a criminal and sends them to jail,” Amnesty International wrote. “There was no clear support for religious minority groups who are standing strong for their right to practice religion.” To make sure nobody missed the point, Amnesty International concluded, “President Obama had a real chance to change that in his visit to Saudi Arabia. He failed.”
Does Susan Rice not remember when Obama literally bowed in deference to Saudi King Abdullah as he greeted him at the opening of the G20 meeting in London in April 2009? Has she forgotten Obama’s decision to place the Saudis’ wishes to evade accountability over the demands for justice from 9/11 victims’ families? That is precisely what Obama did when he vetoed a bill that Congress passed unanimously allowing these families to sue Saudi Arabia over alleged links to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Obama protected Saudi Arabia rather than stick up for aggrieved American citizens, despite evidence supporting suspicions of potential links between some of the hijackers and individuals affiliated with the Saudi government. Fortunately, Congress voted overwhelmingly to override Obama’s veto.
President Obama not only literally bowed to Saudi King Abdullah. He metaphorically bowed to the Islamists in his June 2009 Cairo apologia to the Muslim world for the West’s alleged misdeeds. Veteran observer of Islamist hypocrisy, Anne Beyefsky, has called Obama the “apologist-in-chief” for focusing on the United States’ supposed failure to adequately protect Muslims’ human rights instead of holding the Muslim world to account for its own abysmal human rights record.
Obama’s groveling “engagement” with the ruling thugs in Iran led him to turn his back on the millions of Green Movement dissidents protesting in the streets against the fraudulent 2009 re-election of the hardline Islamist conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, the author of "The Iran Wars," Obama’s White House told the CIA to “stand down” and not provide support to the Green Movement protesters. Obama also ended programs under which the U.S. would have continued documenting Iranian human rights abuses. Obama did not want anything to interfere with his intention to negotiate what turned out to be his disastrous nuclear deal with the Iranian regime, which included cash windfalls for the mullahs and their henchmen.
Obama also admired Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama described the Islamist leader, who unapologetically called Zionism “a crime against humanity,” as "a strong ally and partner in the region and around the world" during a joint news conference in 2013. Obama praised Erdogan's "reforms" and said "we will support efforts in Turkey to uphold the rule of law and good governance and human rights for all." When the two leaders met at the Nuclear Security Summit held in South Korea in March of 2012, Obama called Erdogan his “friend and colleague.”
Erdogan's jails have housed more journalists than any other country in the world, including even Iran and Russia. His government also arrested an American pastor residing in Turkey, Andrew Brunson, in 2016 on suspicions of collaborating with terrorists. The Obama administration stood by while the pastor remained in a Turkish jail without any formal charges filed against him. In contrast to the Obama administration’s decision not to confront Obama’s “friend and colleague,” the Trump administration has acted forcefully against Erdogan’s regime.
“The United States will impose large sanctions on Turkey for their long-time detainment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, a great Christian, family man and wonderful human being,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “He is suffering greatly. This innocent man of faith should be released immediately!” President Trump followed through on his warning.
Susan Rice’s latest tirade is yet another attempt of hers to rewrite the failed legacy of the Obama administration’s foreign policy and to project its moral failings onto the Trump administration. Indeed, the Obama administration was complicit in making excuses for Islamists and enabling them to whitewash their records of serial human rights abuses while piling on against Israel. By deciding to join the dysfunctional UN Human Rights Council in 2009, the Obama administration legitimized the most prominent international platform exploited by the Islamist theocracies and other autocratic regimes to propagate their lies. Susan Rice herself, while serving in her capacity as the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said the Obama administration decided to join the Human Rights Council "because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights." She failed. The Council moved further and further towards becoming the very antithesis of a body truly devoted to protecting human rights.
The Trump administration removed the Human Rights Council’s cloak of hypocrisy and pulled the United States out of this immoral cesspool. “If the Human Rights Council is going to attack countries that uphold human rights and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility,” Nikki R. Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in announcing the withdrawal decision. Susan Rice’s reaction to news of the decision was “Retreat. Withdraw. Fail” – a succinct phrase, to be sure, but one that far more aptly belongs on the epitaph for the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy.
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271014/susan-rices-sudden-concern-over-us-moral-joseph-klein
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at a memorial service for Palestinians terrorists | Photo: Palestinian Embassy in Tunisia via the Daily Mail
No comments:
Post a Comment