Bystanders to Genocide

[Valin]

Townhall:

Cliff May

Feb 17, 2016

 

(Snip)

 

According to a report issued last week by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the total number killed is now at least 470,000– almost twice as high as estimated by the United Nations a year and a half ago. Millions more have been displaced, left destitute and homeless. Hundreds of thousands have been streaming into Europe creating a crisis, the long-term impact of which has yet to be determined.

 

Why didn’t Mr. Obama apply the “responsibility to act” to end the Assad regime’s threat to “our common humanity and our common security”? .......................(Snip)

 

It’s a mystery. And here’s another: Among the senior advisors who made the most vehement case for intervention in Libya was Samantha Power, a journalist, scholar and diplomat who built her brilliant career on the issue of genocide. She literally wrote the book: “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”

 

In 2012, Mr. Obama chose Ms. Power to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board which, I think it only fair to conclude, did not succeed in preventing many atrocities. The following year, the president made her the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations with cabinet-level rank.

 

A brief excerpt from her book: “People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done.

 

“I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.”

 

One must wonder: Is Ambassador Power asking herself that question now that she’s a key figure in an administration that for five years has been choosing to look away from the carnage in Syria and hardly mentioning – much less taking steps to “mitigate and prevent” -- what history is likely to record as the genocide of Middle Easter Christians?

 

(Snip)

 

 

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Why Indeed?

[Valin]

Christians in the Middle East
The Obama Administration and the Question of Genocide
Feb 17 2016

The Obama Administration is working to avoid acknowledging that a genocide against Middle East Christians is happening—even though the EU and Pope Francis say it is. As Nina Shea writes in National Review:

 

With pressure mounting, the State Department in October leaked word that an official genocide designation would be forthcoming but made clear that State would recognize only a Yazidi genocide and not one against Christians. This prompted Congress to mandate that Secretary John Kerry make a determination by March 16 on the precise question of whether “persecution . . . of Christians and people of other religions in the Middle East by violent Islamic extremists . . . constitutes genocide.”

 

While other administrations have committed the sin of silence where genocide was concerned, none has officially signaled that it believes a brutally persecuted and displaced minority is not suffering ongoing genocide. Yet that would be the effect of excluding the Christians from an official listing of genocide victims. Despite foreseeable harm this would cause these Christians, the administration appears on track to do just that.

 

(Snip)

 

It’s an interesting world we are living in: The U.S. government brings down the hammer on a bakery run by (in our view, misguided) American Christians who don’t want to make cakes for gay weddings, but does its best to downplay the systematic destruction of Christian communities across the Middle East. We don’t think Reinhold Niebuhr, often cited by President Obama as an inspiration for his approach to foreign policy, would approve.

 

(Snip)