Greenwald and Vilks
When I postulated in a short post last week that comedienne Kathy Griffin would have faced a more dire fate than being hectored by the Catholic Leauge’s Bill Donohue had she made a joke about Muhammad rather than Jesus, Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald succumbed to his usual hysterics, running off a thousand-plus word screed grouping me alongside “right-wing warmongers” like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Mark Steyn, and calling my fears fantasies.
Not to needle the ever-excitable Greenwald, but in related news about the over-exaggerated Muslim threat that only exists in the minds of “right-wing warmongers,” the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, has called for the death of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for—what else?—drawing a picture of Muhammad. Demonstrating a real entrepreneurial spirit, al-Baghdadi offered a “50 per cent bonus if Mr. Vilks was ‘slaughtered like a lamb’ by having his throat cut.”
Swedish police have placed Vilks under their protection. According to the Times (London), a spokesperson for the Swedish phone company Ericsson says that it has instructed its employees “to keep a low profile in Muslim countries and to take extra care in deciding where to go or park their cars.” The feckless Swedish ambassador to Saudi Arabia met with the head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, offering his “deepest apologies for the controversy created by the publishing of the hurtful depiction.” I must have imagined this, too, right?
Fortunately, Mr. Vilks has responded to the bounty placed on his head with good humor, telling the Times, “I suppose that this makes my art project a bit more serious. It is also good to know how much one is worth.” Greenwald might want to consider emulating Lars Vilks’s sense of humor. All those tantrums have to be taxing.
Greenwald and Vilks
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One Lie Too Many for Hillary?
It’s been over 260 days since Hillary Clinton held her last press conference. Surely, the former secretary of state knew that stonewalling the press like this would antagonize political media and hand her Republican opponents a powerful rhetorical weapon, but she must have determined it was a small price to pay. If Clinton thought avoiding the press would keep her name out of the news, however, that was a significant lapse in judgment. The former secretary of state is still generating headlines from inside the bunker, and few of them are good.
Last week, the New York Times reported that Clinton had told the FBI of an exchange she had had with Colin Powell in which she claimed George W. Bush’s one-time chief diplomat had suggested she use a personal email address. The Times cited an excerpt from a forthcoming Bill Clinton biography by journalist Joe Conason who described that precise exchange between Clinton and Powell at a State Department gathering:
“Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nation’s next top diplomat….Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer.”
This is no defense; it’s an indictment. Secretary Clinton had, according to Conason’s reporting, already determined that it was in her best interest to use a private server for her electronic communications. That server was used for all Clinton’s correspondence, including sensitive and classified emails related to American national and diplomatic security—despite Powell’s explicit warning against doing just that.
In a statement, Powell’s office insisted that he did not recall the dinner conversation, but he did remember describing to Clinton in writing how he had used a personal AOL address to archive and account for unclassified communications.
Powell did not like the way the story came out. To put it mildly. “The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did,” he told People Magazine on Sunday. “Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” he said of Clinton’s email antics.
This is no small thing. Clinton told the FBI in an interview regarding her special server that it was Powell who suggested to her that she use this personal email account. Powell now denies it. FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress that there was no basis to suspect that Clinton lied to federal investigators at any point. Without a verbatim transcript of Clinton’s interview with the FBI, there is no concrete evidence she did otherwise—except that Powell is saying, in effect, that she misled investigators by saying she was following his lead. He just threw her to the wolves.
On Monday, the group Judicial Watch revealed that it had secured some of the thousands of work-related emails Clinton had failed to hand over to the State Department. Judicial Watch says it will soon release emails showing that Clinton aide Huma Abedin provided donors to the Clinton Foundation with preferential access to the Secretary of State in violation of ethical standards and protocol. Moreover, the State Department is prepared to begin the release of nearly 15,000 emails the former secretary should have handed over in October, just before the nation heads to the polls.
The email scandal that has plagued Clinton since March of 2015 is beginning to close in around her, and she has yet to emerge from her foxhole. When will she?
Clinton’s Ticking Time Bomb
Any Republicans hoping the ongoing ethical problems revolving around the Clinton Foundation will somehow turn the tide in the presidential election are likely indulging in excessive optimism. That said, the Clinton camp is making a mistake if its denizens think the firestorm regarding conflicts of interest involving foundation donors at Hillary Clinton’s State Department can be doused by vague promises about the foundation’s future conduct. As the Wall Street Journal noted on Friday, assurances by former President Clinton that the foundation won’t accept corporate or foreign donations if his wife is elected won’t help. Nor will his promise to resign from its board. Or guarantees that Chelsea will stop raising money for it. As the Journal’s editorial correctly points out, if such activities become problematic once Hillary Clinton becomes president, why weren’t they just as inappropriate when she was secretary of state? During those four years, the Clinton family business—a political slush fund thinly disguised as a charity that peddles influence in exchange for supporting the former first family’s lavish lifestyle–was doing big business. And, as Clinton’s emails and the reporting done by liberal newspapers like the New York Times show, we’ve just started to scratch the surface of revelations involving links between those who gave the Clintons big bucks and their influence on U.S. foreign policy.
Secure in the knowledge that Trump’s rants will keep the focus off of Hillary’s problems, their foundation is likely to keep on amassing huge donations right up until the last possible moment. In doing so they are forgetting that if Trump is defeated, the liberal mainstream media will likely go back to their early 2015 mode, when papers like the Times were devoting massive resources to reporting on the foundation’s activities. They won’t hesitate to go back to investigations that could mire her administration in scandals, which won’t compete with Trump nonsense for the front page. The past and continued activities of the foundation could become a cancer that might eat away at her presidency. Every dime it took in during her campaign, especially those given in the last months once her lead over Trump began to build, will be especially scrutinized.
The Clintons are either too besotted with their self-image as do-gooders unfairly afflicted by a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” or too invested in the defensive idea that any systematic shutdown right now would prove their critics right, to listen to sensible Democrats and liberals. Though Trump’s behavior may mean the foundation won’t stop Clinton from winning in November, it’s possible Bill and Hillary’s stubborn refusal to face facts about the foundation has sewn the seeds of her presidency’s self-immolation.
The Crushing Guilt of Our Inaction
Today, the world finds itself transfixed by the haunting image of a Syrian child brutalized by war. He is Omran Daqneesh. His exact age is unknown, but his features suggest he is not yet five-years-old. He is covered in the gray dust of the building that collapsed around him following a strike in his war-ravaged home in the city of Aleppo. Blood streams down his face, but he shows no signs of stress. Omran stares right through the camera with the numbness of a combat veteran. And he is just that; war is the only life he’s ever experienced.
The ancient city of Aleppo is being razed to the ground. Its hospitals have been systematically destroyed by the Russian air force. Its neighborhoods have been attacked by Assad’s barrel bombs and with chemical weapons, the most recent of which occurred just last week. Its residents have little food, water, or medical supplies, save that which manages to slip into the city through brief and recent openings in the blockades. Over the summer, the city’s estimated 326,000 were subjected to a starvation campaign.
The horrors that are occurring in Syria—and have continued for years in part as the unintended result of Western inaction—are worse today than anyone could have predicted when they began over five years ago. When Barack Obama declined to follow through with his intention to punish Bashar al-Assad for defying international norms and gassing civilian populations in 2013, few imagined the nightmares that would follow. Nearly a half-million Syrians are estimated dead. The terrorist caliphate ISIS exports fear and death across the globe. Millions are fleeing the crucible into sprawling camps in the Middle East and Europe. There, these refugees are sowing political chaos, shattering the European Union’s political consensus on and border-free travel, and yielding the rise of far-right political elements.
It is worth remembering that only a year ago another image of a Syrian child captured the world’s attention. It was 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a toddler who had fled the battlefields of Syria along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees, lying lifeless and face down on a Turkish beach. It was a photograph so heartbreaking that it seemed to change European policy toward the refugees overnight—and just as quickly created new policy and practical dilemmas for the European governments moved to act on their behalf.
Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian forces in Syria have been actively attacking militias supported directly by the West and the United States, heightening tensions and creating the potential for miscalculation. It was just two months after Aylan washed up on that Turkish beach that a Russian warplane was targeted and destroyed by a member of the NATO alliance. What was once merely the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century is now also its most dangerous geopolitical crisis.
Amid the tears for Syria’s most visible victims of war and terror, skeptical observers are compelled to ask what the West is prepared to do to truly alleviate this suffering. The answer is, clearly, not much.
The Obama administration is paralyzed, forever begging the Russian government to impose order on the chaos it has fostered. Hillary Clinton pledges merely a slightly more muscular version of Obama’s status quo, augmented by the creation of no-fly zones designed to ground only Assad’s air force. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has put $5 million behind his first ad of the general election pledging to oppose the resettlement of Syrian refugees. So what would he do about the crisis tearing Europe and the Middle East apart? He repeatedly replied in the affirmative when Sean Hannity suggested the creation of “safe zones” inside Syria that may house refugees, but it’s plain he didn’t know what he was saying.
Where will these “safe zones” be established? What armed force would police them? What air forces would patrol the skies above and what military would secure and defend this sanctuary? Surely Trump will contend that a multinational force from the region should take the reins of such an operation, but this is a fantasy. Without a commitment of Western ground forces, all of this talk is just that—and its purpose isn’t to create an action plan but to mitigate our guilt for doing nothing.
When the Western world is resolved to absorb the costs associated with intervening in the conflict in Syria and imposing peace on its combatants, then the tears shed for Omran will be more than just emoting. For now, the Western world is simply seeking to soothe its conscience for prioritizing its own insularity over the lives of the innocent.
How the UN Enables Massacres
The Syria Campaign, an advocacy group, has put together a meticulous report arguing that the United Nations has hopelessly compromised itself by agreeing to the Syrian regime’s terms and filtering money and aid through the Syrian government. The Executive Summary minces no words:
By choosing to prioritize cooperation with the Syrian government at all costs, the UN has enabled the distribution of billions of dollars of international aid to be directed by one side in the conflict. This has contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians, either through starvation, malnutrition-related illness, or a lack of access to medical aid. It has also led to the accusation that this misshapen UN aid operation is affecting – perhaps prolonging – the course of the conflict itself.
Alas, this is absolutely true. The real tragedy is that the UN’s decisions and compromises were eminently foreseeable. After all, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is simply following the precedent established by his predecessors Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros Ghali, and their dealings with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, alas, with the same exact results.
The story of the UN betrayal of Iraqis starts in the wake of the U.S.-led coalition’s liberation of Kuwait. While UN Security Council 687 maintained the sanctions on Iraq after the liberation of Kuwait, it also allowed Iraq to import food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. In May 1991, the UN Inter-Agency Humanitarian Program formed to meet the needs of the most vulnerable Iraqis and, between 1991 and 1996, the fund disbursed close to $1 billion.
In order for Iraq to provide for its own humanitarian needs, on August 15, 1991, the Security Council adopted resolutions 705 and 706, which allowed Iraq to sell its oil in order to acquire revenue to purchase essential humanitarian supplies. Saddam Hussein, like Bashar al-Assad, sought to hold his people hostage and leverage their suffering into advantage. Accordingly, he refused to accept the resolution. Pictures of sick children—even if their suffering was the result of the Iraqi government withholding rations and humanitarian supplies—were too valuable a propaganda tool to lose.
Again, the international community sought to facilitate the influx of food and humanitarian supplies into Iraq, and again Baghdad resisted. On April 14, 1995, the UN Security Council passed Security Council Resolution 986, the so-called “oil-for-food” program. Declaring the need for the “equitable distribution of humanitarian relief to all segments of the Iraqi population,” the Resolution provided for the creation of an escrow account into which purchasers of Iraqi oil could make full payment, and from which the United Nations would purchase supplies and monitor their distribution. Again, Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with the program.
The UN was not willing to declare its position untenable and forfeit the billions of dollars which the program awarded it for overhead and salaries. Boutros Boutros Ghali authorized negotiations with Saddam’s government and, on May 20, 1996, the secretariat agreed to Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for implementation of Security Council Resolution 986. Among other compromises, the MOU allowed the Iraqi government to contract directly with suppliers and be the sole body allowed to request supplies. In exchange, the Iraqi government committed to assist UN personnel and provide them with freedom of movement within Iraq. It was one thing for the Iraqi government to pledge cooperation, but quite another thing to make good on its promise. On average, the Iraqi government denied 55 visas per year to UN personnel. Any UN contractor who performed their functions too professionally or refused to defer to Saddam’s political concerns soon found themselves unemployed.
In the end, the Iraqi government spent less than 25 percent of its oil income on humanitarian programs. Iraqis suffered under sanctions, but only those whom Saddam wanted to suffer. Under the UN’s gaze, Saddam Hussein denied food and medicine to Iraqi Shi‘ites, even while the Iraqi government exported baby food to make money. Meanwhile, Saddam’s government spent several billion dollars in diverted funds on palaces, his family, his friends, and corrupted UN officials.
What is going on today in Aleppo is a tragedy. The media might not pay much attention, but already observers say the suffering in Aleppo and the UN’s betrayal of those suffering under siege is worse than what occurred in Srebrenica and, the bloodshed and dislocation also promises to surpass that of Rwanda 22 years ago.
As the UN prepares to elect a new Secretary General, it is long past time to consider that position not one of international diplomat and gadfly commentator, but rather as someone who can whip the UN bureaucracy into shape and prevent its complicity in such tragedies. Simply put, it should not be the job of the United Nations to compromise with dictators. If dictatorships do not allow UN assistance to go where it needs to go, then the UN should withdrawal its presence and allow military powers to do what can be done by other means to break sieges, offer protections, and provide relief. To do otherwise simply allows mass murderers like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad to use the UN as a shield and perhaps a piggy bank enabling their regimes’ dirty work.
The Poles and the Death Camps
The people of Poland are right to be upset about calling the places where Nazis killed millions of Jews “Polish death camps.” The phrase shifts blame from the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust to the invaded nation where the bulk of the murders took place. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Polish government’s decision to push through a law criminalizing the use of the phrase is evidence of something other than a desire to keep the historical record straight.
Any discussion of the “Polish death camps” canard must start with one unalterable truth. In spite of the history of Polish anti-Semitism, the Holocaust is the fault of its German perpetrators and their collaborators, not the Polish people. The fact that the death camps were located in Poland was primarily a matter of logistics, not a function of a belief that Poles would help the Nazis kill Jews. Germans staffed the camps where many of the three million Polish Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died and, to a lesser extent, non-Polish Eastern Europeans; not Poles.
The second point to be underlined is the extent of Polish suffering under German occupation. The plight of Poles was not as dire as that of the Jews, all of whom were marked for death. But Poles were victimized more than any other occupied nation. At least 1.5 million Poles were deported to Germany for forced labor. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in concentration camps, and at least 1.9 million Polish civilians were killed during the war. That figure includes many who were murdered by the Communist occupiers of Eastern Poland in the aftermath of the 1939 invasion by both Germany and the Soviet Union.
The extent of Polish resistance to the Nazis must also be taken into account in any discussion of the period. The Poles fought bravely against impossible odds both at the outset of the war and in 1944 when they rose against the German. That revolt was brutally crushed in a defeat that was due in no small part to the cynical refusal of the advancing Soviets to help and resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 Poles.
Many thousands of Poles also risked their lives to save Jews. Among their number was Jan Karski, the Home Army officer who brought word of the death camps to the West and sadly was ignored by President Franklin Roosevelt.
But it is also true that many contemporary Poles are reluctant to accept another aspect of their history. Anti-Semitism was endemic in pre-Holocaust Poland. Many, if not most Poles were largely indifferent to the fate of their Jewish compatriots.
After the war, many Poles also were hostile to the pitiful remnant of Jewish survivors who sought to return to their homes and property, many of which had been taken over by non-Jews. This year marked the 70th anniversary of the massacre of such Jews at Kielce by Polish anti-Semites, a crime that many Poles continue to either deny or ignore. Such denial also exists about Polish murders of Jews at Jedwabne in 1941.
Thus, while we may sympathize with Polish anger about the “death camps” slur, any effort to correct that record should also be done with the consciousness that Poland has to account for its history, too. Fortunately, there has been progress along those lines. The heroic efforts of the late Pope John Paul II to combat endemic anti-Semitism both in his own nation and among Catholics everywhere deserve to be remembered with honor by Jews. The post-Cold War government of Poland also should be given credit for maintaining strong and friendly relations with Israel. Support for and interest in Jewish culture among Poles also testifies to the way Poland is changing.
The Poles would probably be better off refraining from passing laws that infringe speech. But whether they persist in this mistake or not, it would be a pity if arguments about the “death camps” law were to undo the progress that has been made to heal the historic rift between Jews and Poles.