WILL OBAMA STAND UP TO OR SMILE
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
New Jersey Jewish Standard
t/item/will_obama_stand_up_to_or_smile/7945
April 24 2009
NJ
Truth regardless of consequences
The picture of the President of the United States smiling broadly as he
met President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela startled me. Our president is a
nice guy. Chavez is anything but. The U.S. State Department maintains
that Chavez has attacked democratic traditions and has put Venezuelan
democracy on life support with unchecked concentration of power,
political persecution, and intimidation. Foreign Affairs magazine
says that Chavez is a power-hungry dictator with autocratic and
megalomaniacal tendencies whose authoritarian vision and policies are
a serious threat to his people. In testimony before the U.S. Senate,
the South American project director for the Center for Strategic
International Studies said that Chavez’s government engages in
"arresting opposition leaders, torturing some members of the opposition
(according to human rights organizations), and encouraging, if not
directing, its squads of Bolivarian Circles to beat up members of
Congress and intimidate voters — all with impunity." In spite of
a presidential term limit of six years, Chavez has suggested that
he would like to remain in power for 25 years. Hmmm. An autocratic
dictator who abuses human rights and undermines democracy being
warmly embraced by the American president. There’s something wrong
with that picture.
Then there was the incident of Obama’s seeming to bow before King
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 Summit in London. The president’s
people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great
deference from the American president to the dictator of a country
that just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes
for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to
her home. This is the same Abdullah who, when asked why Saudi Arabia
prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam, said,
"It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that
are alien to its beliefs or principles."
Of course Obama is pursuing a renewed relationship with Cuba, a
country that engages in systematic human rights abuses, including
torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and extrajudicial
executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year
prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not
only is emigration illegal but even discussing it carries a six-month
prison sentence.
Watching all this, I wondered what the new standards are. How
oppressive must a leader be before we determine that he has not
merited a hug by the democratic standard-bearer of the free world,
the president of the United States?
Yes, I get it. We have to speak to our enemies and America has to push
"reset" on its relationship with many of these countries. We should
try to change them through charm. But who said the president himself,
rather than a lower-level diplomat, must do so? And if Obama feels
that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be
with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show Girl Scouts
selling cookies?
It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in
countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia to see the American
president back-slapping their oppressors when these victims have
always looked up to the United States as their champions.
In Turkey, Obama boldly declared that "The United States is not, and
never will be, at war with Islam." But the person who was at war with
Islam, Saddam Hussein, the man who killed nearly one million Muslims,
was removed by a country that has already paid with the lives of 4,500
of its service men and women. The same is true of the Taliban, another
group that the Obama administration is considering talking with, which
beat Muslim women in the streets of Afghanistan. Yet the president
seems reluctant to publicly identify these real enemies of Islam.
Like many Americans, I have watched our president and have been
awed by his capacity to draw those who hate us near. He is a man
of considerable charm and grace. But I have to admit that I am
increasingly troubled by his seeming inability to call out dictators.
While he was campaigning for the presidency Obama promised, "As
president I will recognize the Armenian genocide." But in a press
conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use
the word "genocide" when challenged by a reporter on the issue.
Yet, it was Obama’s early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power
of Harvard who wrote "A Problem from Hell," a definitive book on
the non-American intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides,
beginning with the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks that
killed 1.5 million Armenians between the years of 1915 and 1923. The
book changed my life. As a Jew who does not want the world to forget
the Holocaust, I can only imagine the pain of the Armenian community
as it struggles to have modern Turkey acknowledge the crime. And why
should modern Turkey not oblige? No one is blaming it for something
that happened 90 years ago. It is not today’s generation that is at
fault. But nations must come to terms with their own history. Could
any of us imagine what kind of country that the United States would
be if it denied that it was responsible for the abomination of
African-American slavery and segregation?
All this leads to one important question. Suppose Obama succeeds in
building friendships with Chavez, Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
and the Taliban. What then? Does America still get to feel that it
stands for something? Will we still be the beacon of liberty to the
rest of the world, or will we have sold out in the name of political
expediency? And do any of us seriously believe that presidential
friendship is going to get a megalomaniac like Hugo Chavez to ease
up on the levers of power, or are we just feeding his ego by showing
him he can be a tyrant and still have a beer with the president of
the United States? Will the Iranians really stop enriching uranium
because of diplomacy rather than economic sanctions?
I know that the Bush administration made many mistakes and I am fan
of Obama precisely because of his sunny optimism. But President Bush
was not, as Chavez once called him, the devil, and it could just be
that his emphasis on America being the great champion of democracy and
freedom, a position that was most eloquently articulated by President
Kennedy in his inaugural address, is a legacy that ought to belong
to Obama as much as it did to his predecessor.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values
Network. He has just published "The Kosher Sutra: Eight Sacred Secrets
for Reigniting Desire and Restoring Passion for Life."