Universal Human Rights and President Obama
Posted on October 20, 2009
Filed Under Aung San Suu Kyi, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Burma, China, Communism, Dalai Lama, Germany, Human Rights, Iran, Liu Xiaobo, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sudan, WWI, WWII | 1 Comment
Peace has been an almost fleeting dream since the dawn of history, many died defending it, far more died pursuing it. One of the time honored ways of achieving some semblance of peace and security, even if for a short period of time, is by granting equal rights to the inhabitants of a country and/or a region. Wherever human rights are trampled upon, or simply do not exist, you can be sure to find discontent that will only find escape through hatred, violence, bloodshed.
Bret Stephens writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?
To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the march of human freedom. It’s a march to which candidate Obama paid rich (if solipsistic) tribute in last year’s big Berlin speech. “At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West,” waxed Mr. Obama to the assembled thousands. “This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom.”
On July 24th, 2008, Obama the presidential candidate became the darling of Europe when he electrified his audience in Berlin. Speaking there, wowing Europeans, was meant to disguise his total lack of experience, his utter failure to understand global affairs. It worked! The feelings he expressed on German soil, however, proved to be merely those of a well rehearsed actor brilliantly speaking his lines. As WSJ continues:
Those were the words. What’s been the record?
China: In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Beijing with a conciliating message about the country’s human-rights record. “Our pressing on those [human-rights] issues can’t interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis,” she said.
In fact, there has been no pressing whatsoever on human rights. President Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama last month, presumably so as not to ruffle feathers with the people who will now be financing his debts. In June, Liu Xiaobo, a leading signatory of the pro-democracy Charter 08 movement, was charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” But as a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing admitted to the Journal, “neither the White House nor Secretary Clinton have made any public comments on Liu Xiaobo.”
Obama, the man who promised to fix America’s image in the world could not get himself to meet the Dalai Lama. Why? He feared antagonizing China! China and its regime who repeatedly and ruthlessly destroy the rights of its own people (remember Tiananmen Square, to mention just one instance?), who constantly trample the rights of Tibetans, are far more respected (feared?) than the Dalai Lama in Obama’s eyes! Every American president in the last few decades met with the Dalai Lama, every European head of state met and lauded him, but Obama could not be bothered!
American presidents never shied away from standing up for China’s human rights activists, but Obama prefers to play it shy!
Sudan: In 2008, candidate Obama issued a statement insisting that “there must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing. . . . The U.N. Security Council should impose tough sanctions on the Khartoum government immediately.”
Exactly right. So what should Mr. Obama do as president? Yesterday, the State Department rolled out its new policy toward Sudan, based on “a menu of incentives and disincentives” for the genocidal Sudanese government of Omar Bashir. It’s the kind of menu Mr. Bashir will languidly pick his way through till he dies comfortably in his bed.
People are thrown out of their homes, government backed janjaweed militias rape and kill by the hundreds of thousands but our President has failed to come to rescue of millions of black Africans. Is it his liberal elitism, his inconvenient prejudices?
Iran: Mr. Obama’s week-long silence on Iran’s “internal affairs” following June’s fraudulent re-election was widely noted. Not so widely noted are the administration’s attempts to put maximum distance between itself and human-rights groups working the Iran beat.
Earlier this year, the State Department denied a grant request for New Haven, Conn.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The Center maintains perhaps the most extensive record anywhere of Iran’s 30-year history of brutality. The grant denial was part of a pattern: The administration also abruptly ended funding for Freedom House’s Gozaar project, an online Farsi- and English-language forum for discussing political issues.
It’s easy to see why Tehran would want these groups de-funded and shut down. But why should the administration, except as a form of pre-emptive appeasement?
Neville Chamberlain is alive and well residing in the White House!
Burma: In July, Mr. Obama renewed sanctions on Burma. In August, he called the conviction of opposition leader (and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) Aung San Suu Kyi a violation of “the universal principle of human rights.”
Yet as with Sudan, the administration’s new policy is “engagement,” on the theory that sanctions haven’t worked. Maybe so. But what evidence is there that engagement will fare any better? In May 2008, the Burmese junta prevented delivery of humanitarian aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. Some 150,000 people died in plain view of “world opinion,” in what amounted to a policy of forced starvation.
Leave aside the nausea factor of dealing with the authors of that policy. The real question is what good purpose can possibly be served in negotiations that the junta will pursue only (and exactly) to the extent it believes will strengthen its grip on power. It takes a remarkable presumption of good faith, or perhaps stupidity, to imagine that the Burmas or Sudans of the world would reciprocate Mr. Obama’s engagement except to seek their own advantage.
Appeasement has never worked throughout history, why would any sane individual think that this time it will?
It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that “interferes” with America’s purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them. Yet that is exactly the record of Mr. Obama’s time thus far in office.
President Obama, as a graduate cum laude from the corrupt machine of Chicago politics is nothing more than an cynical empty suit devoid of any principle, any inexpedient moral driving force.
In Massachusetts not long ago, I found myself driving behind a car with “Free Tibet,” “Save Darfur,” and “Obama 08″ bumper stickers. I wonder if it will ever dawn on the owner of that car that at least one of those stickers doesn’t belong.
Some Obamabots are starting to wake up, most haven’t, most won’t.
Remember Chamberlain’s famous words, on September 30th of 1938, as he held up a document bearing the Munich agreement with one Adolf Hitler? Peace for our time! he screamed out to a cheering crowd at London’s Heston Aerodrome… Later that day, and again holding up the agreement, outside of 10 Downing Street he concluded his speech by saying:
“My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
I hope the blind sheeple, at least, get to sleep quietly in their beds.
Yet, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded him the 2009 honor…
When he spoke in Berlin, last year, candidate Obama eloquently said (as the transcript of that speech – on The Huffington Post – reads):
And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.
And that’s when the airlift began – when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.
The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.
But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”
Nice words! People were touched, hearts brimmed with hope… Did the speaker actually mean anything by his speech besides a photo op and a great sound bite?
Perhaps, it would be befitting for Obama to go Norway and accept the Nobel Prize in the name of the well over one million American GIs who died during WWI, WWII and other conflicts throughout the world fighting against oppression. Yes, it would be most fitting for President Obama to accept the Nobel Prize in the name of those Americans who gave their lives so the world would enjoy freedom. But, he won’t! Such emotions, such admiration, such pride, have no part in his moral fabric. Pity!
Chaim
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