It Is Time for Saudi Arabia - a False Ally - to Defend Itself

Amnesty International says Saudi Arabia ranks
 after China and Iran for the number of executions.

Over the last three-quarters of a century America has squandered trillions of dollars protecting Saudi Arabia - one of the world's worse human rights violators - and other theocratic regimes in the Middle East not to mention the squandering of the lives of thousands of American military personnel.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is the third largest spender on military equipment and arms in the world - only America and China spend more- even as it continues to fund radical Islam which preaches hate against the West and America in particular (15 of the 9-11 hijackers subscribed to this toxic dogma).  Despite all this, America is supposed to respect Saudi culture - an oxymoron, in my view - and ignore the abuse of women, gays, and the jailing and murder of political opponents and human rights activists.  Now, the Saudis want America to go to war with Iran, an equal menace to human rights that has a competing form of toxic Islam.  It's time for Americans to say "no" in unmistakable terms to being played to act as Saudi Arabia mercenary. Hopefully, enough public opposition will force the narcissistic moron in the White House from squandering more American treasure and lives protecting a nation whose "values" are an insult to what America is supposed to represent.  A column in the New York Times argues that it is time for the Saudis and similar corrupt and despotic regimes to go it alone.  Here are highlights:

The missiles that struck last weekend in Saudi Arabia did not just destroy oil tanks. They also dealt the final blow to a doctrine that has been fading for years: the belief that the United States maintains a security umbrella able to protect the oil-rich Persian Gulf states from their enemies — and, especially, from Iran.

President Trump’s miscalculations helped get us here. But the current Gulf crisis is not just about this administration and the pitfalls of its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The United States has been disengaging from the Middle East since the catastrophe of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Now that shale has made America so much less dependent on the Middle East’s oil, it is hard to imagine any American president risking significant blood and treasure to defend Saudi Arabia.

For decades, the leaders of the Gulf seemed to believe their close ties with the United States (and the billions of dollars spent on American weapons) made them almost invulnerable. But the faith in American power always blinked away some inconvenient facts. Iran’s population and military strength dwarf those of the Gulf countries, and the United States is nearly 10,000 miles away. In any conceivable war, the Gulf’s cities would be among the first targets. And unlike Iran, those cities are intensely vulnerable: A single bomb could shatter the status of Dubai as a safe hub for trade, transport and tourism. Now the nightmare appears to be coming true. On Saturday, several volleys of Iranian missiles eluded the Saudis’ expensive American-supplied defenses, neatly puncturing oil storage tanks and facilities at two of the kingdom’s most important sites and causing global oil prices to spike. The damage was limited, but its message was not: Iran could strike the Gulf’s economic lifeline at any time.

The political follow-up has been equally chilling to Riyadh. Mr. Trump, reluctant to be drawn into a war that could damage his election prospects, responded with his usual blend of bluster and bargaining.

It is still too early to say what will come of all this. If the provocations do not spin into open war — which would almost surely force the United States to get involved — Iran is likely to emerge stronger in any subsequent diplomacy, whether with the Trump administration or its neighbors across the Gulf.

The American commitment to protect the Gulf monarchies has its roots in 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia’s first king, Abdelaziz ibn Saud. It grew stronger during the Cold War, when presidents from Harry Truman through George Bush believed protecting Saudi Arabia’s oil fields was essential to fighting Communism.

The relationship has been tested — first by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, then by the belief among Gulf leaders that President Barack Obama abandoned them during the Arab uprisings of 2011.

The Saudis and Emiratis initially believed he would be a tougher guardian than Mr. Obama. They were delighted when he [Trump] withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran and reimposed heavy sanctions.

More recently, though, Gulf leaders have become uneasy about the mismatch between Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and his actions.  . . . .  His decision to fire John Bolton, his hawkish national security adviser, has strengthened a belief that Mr. Trump does not want war. But many feared he would stumble into one.

The Emiratis now appear to be wondering if they can rely on this president. After a series of attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf, they pointedly refused to blame Tehran, and then quietly sent a diplomatic delegation to Iran. They also pulled most of their troops out of the war in Yemen.

Will the Saudis respond in the same way? They have been waging a ruinous proxy war in Yemen since 2015, with the goal of teaching Iran a lesson. The lesson now seems to be flowing in the other direction. The Houthi militia in Yemen,  which is allied with Iran, took responsibility for the missiles that struck Saudi Arabia last week. No one seems to take that claim seriously, but the Houthis have been firing drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia with rising frequency. The Saudis may have to recognize that only diplomacy will bring that war to an end.

[A]t this point, it seems more likely that his [Trump's] fecklessness will provide them with a very different, and perhaps more enduring legacy: the recognition that they must learn to manage Iran without American help.

With the trillions of dollars wasted in the Middle East, America's infrastructure could have been rebuilt and murderous regimes might well have destroyed themselves.  No more American lives or money should be spent protecting a false ally. 

Letter in Opposition to the State Department's "Commission on Unalienable Rights"

A trio of clear and present dangers to human rights.

In a post yesterday I looked at the Trump/Pence regime's dangerous and disingenuous "Commission on Inalienable Rights" which appears designed to roll back LGBT and women's rights.  The Commission's membership is full of far right Christian extremists to the exclusion of legitimate experts on human rights issues.  Now, a letter has been made available to stand in opposition to the Commission and to demand that resources be directed to legitimate and non-sectarian resources to fight human rights abuses both in America and across the globe.  The letter, which I encourage  both individuals and organizations to sign can be found here.  Follow the instructions to join the list of signatories.  Here are excerpts from the letter:

We . . . . write to express our deep concern with the Department of State’s recently announced Commission on Unalienable Rights. We object to the Commission’s stated purpose, which we find harmful to the global effort to protect the rights of all people and a waste of resources; the Commission’s make-up, which lacks ideological diversity and appears to reflect a clear interest in limiting human rights, including the rights of women and LGBTQI individuals; and the process by which the Commission came into being and is being administered, which has sidelined human rights experts in the State Department’s own Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

We urge you to immediately disband this body, and to focus your personal attention on the significant challenges currently facing the protection of human rights globally, including those threats to human rights generated by Trump administration policy and rhetoric.

We are likewise dismayed by the well-documented views of a significant majority of the Commission’s 10 members. Taken as a whole, the Commission clearly fails to achieve the legal requirement that a federal advisory committee “be fairly balanced in its membership in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed.” Almost all of the Commission’s members have focused their professional lives and scholarship on questions of religious freedom, and some have sought to elevate it above other fundamental rights. The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is a fundamental right, but one of among 30 such rights enshrined in the [1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] UDHR.

No Commissioner focuses nearly as exclusively on any other issue of pressing concern contained with the UDHR, including the right to asylum, the right to be free from torture, the right to equal protection against any discrimination, or any of the UDHR’s enumerated economic, social, and cultural rights, among other topics.

Moreover, the Commission’s chair and members are overwhelmingly clergy or scholars known for extreme positions opposing LGBTQI and reproductive rights, and some have taken public stances in support of indefensible human rights violations. The Commission’s chair has stated that marriage equality presents a danger to children. A Commission member has similarly stated that “the unavoidable message” of same-sex marriage “is a profoundly false and damaging one.” A third Commission member has argued publicly against the use of contraception even when that use is meant to limit the spread of deadly disease. A fourth has described questions of gender identity as “a matter of mental illness or some other pathology” and “a mark of a heartless culture.” A fifth has suggested that widespread outrage at the Saudi Arabian government’s premeditated murder and dismemberment of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi is grounded in U.S. domestic political considerations. A sixth has described the government of the United Arab Emirates as one “committed to tolerance…committed to civil society,” despite that government’s egregious and well-documented human rights record at home and abroad.

Rather than continue with this Commission, we urge you to use the resources of your office to take action on the great many grave human rights issues facing the world today, including those you have the power to improve directly. These include actions that have exposed children and other migrants to acute distress and, in some instances, long-lasting psychological damage. They include extreme selectivity and hypocrisy in raising human rights concerns, and rhetoric from the president and administration supportive of many of the world’s leading human rights violators, from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman. They include routine attacks on a free press and independent judiciary, behaviors emulated and applauded by strongmen worldwide. And they include policies that will exacerbate the impacts of climate change, which threatens the rights of every one of us.

Join me in signing this letter.   A piece in Slate further elaborates on the danger this commission poses to human rights. 

Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights

An idea Trump/Pence's new Commission would
seemingly like to bring back - gays
in concentration camps.

The Trump/Pence regime has established a "Commission on Unalienable Rights" that will use "natural law" to determine what rights matter.  Those appointed to the commission are a who's who of far right Christian extremists with documented histories of anti-LGBT animus and opposition to women's rights. By the composition of the Commission membership, it is clear from the start that some rights - and only some people - will matter.  The use of the term "natural law" - a favorite of the Christofascists - is a dead give away that the agenda of the Commission will be anti-gay and anti-modernity.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous Commission and the farcical pretense that true protection of human rights of all people will be on the Commission's radar screen.  The move is a clear effort on Trump's part to shore up support among evangelicals who have shown themselves only too happy to look the other way from the near concentration camps Trump/Pence is operating on the southern border to deal with what lily white evangelicals view as the "brown menace."  Here are column excerpts:

For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.

Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.” He did so in the same week as President Trump demonstrated, once again, his contempt for the Constitution by tweeting that he’d leave office “in six years, or maybe 10 or 14 (just kidding).” Ha-ha.

In the same Twitter rant Trump called himself “a true Stable Genius.” Now the Genius in Chief, through his secretary of state, has determined that the time is ripe to sift through human rights claims and, in Pompeo’s words, determine “which rights are entitled to gain respect.”

Autocrats around the world, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping, have long cast human rights groups as Trojan horses for a liberal democratic agenda. It’s an attempt to deflect attention from their gross human rights abuses. Now it appears that Trump’s United States is preparing to join the club of human rights skeptics. A more complete disavowal of what America has stood for since Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 is hard to imagine.

This, remember, is the administration that has consistently relegated human rights in its valueless foreign policy; saw in the Saudi murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi no cause to reprimand Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; embraced North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un; kowtowed to every autocrat outside Iran and Venezuela; and separated migrant children from their families to hold them in appalling camps.

The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights. It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, Mr. Secretary [Pompeo]. A lot of bipartisan and international consensus, consolidated over the postwar decades, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other horrors, exists as to what human rights are and what America’s role in defending them should be.

Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being. They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none. They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it. They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.

In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” These “natural rights” at the time, of course, included chattel slavery and the dehumanization of black people, as well as the disenfranchisement of women.

Today, the Trump administration’s war on reproductive rights and L.G.B.T. rights is pretty clear. On gay and transgender issues, it is hostile; its attempt to dehumanize the trans community is evident.

For Pompeo, religious rights are plainly human rights; as to the rest, it’s unclear. As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.

No plausible reason for this strange initiative has been given. Trump, having shown willful neglect toward human rights, now wants to redefine them. The exercise can only reflect his contempt for the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, gays, minorities, women’s reproductive rights, the safety of migrant children, truth and decency — as well as his boundless affection for human rights violators. It is, in other words, a disaster in the making.

Be very, very afraid.

The Parallels Between Evangelicals and Pro-Nazi German Christians

While there are surely many good evangelical Christians in America, far too many are remaining silent and allowing themselves to be defined by the likes of Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who not only are all in for Donald Trump, but are embracing his racist policies with enthusiasm and, more dangerously, legitimizing human rights abuse in the eyes of their gullible and racist followers.  A piece in Sojourners looks at the dangerous rhetoric of James Dobson which disturbingly parallels that of German pastors and theologians in Hitler's Third Reich.  

The ultimate problem is that these supposed "leaders" are racists - especially Tony Perkins for Family Research Council, a certified hate group - and their anti-immigrant animus is ultimately due to one factor: the immigrants at America's southern border have brown, not white, skin. Evangelicals who remain silent and fail to condemn such rhetoric in the end become complicit in the horrors that it legitimizes.   They will become no better than their counterparts in Germany 80 years ago. Here are column highlights:

Growing up in conservative evangelical churches in North Carolina, the name of Dr. James Dobson and his organization, Focus on the Family, were regularly cited by my pastors as authorities on what they considered the most pressing social issues. Dobson remains influential and, although he has not led Focus on the Family for 15 years, his latest organization, Family Talk, focuses on “marriage, parenthood, evangelism, and the sanctity of human life and encouraging righteousness in the culture.” . . . which is why his rhetoric concerning immigrants in his July 2019 newsletter is so disturbing.

The characterization of the men, women, and children in the camps includes several troubling phrases. They are described as carriers of “lice, scabies, and other diseases”; they sit silently with “plaintive eyes;” they are from “the lowest rung of many societies.” The most alarming rhetoric occurs in the closing paragraph:

What I’ve told you is only a glimpse of what is occurring on the nation’s border. I don’t know what it will take to change the circumstances. I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. . . . Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. . . . we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.

The closing phrase is ambiguous. It won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen. Is Dobson referring to consequences for the U.S. if the problem is not solved? Is he describing the inevitable consequences migrants face at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they are placed into camps by border patrol agents? Or, is he suggesting there are worse consequences to come for those who are crossing the border or in detention?

As a student of the history of biblical interpretation, the rhetoric employed by Dobson and other evangelical leaders is frighteningly similar to that of German pastors and theologians in the Third Reich. It appears that Christians have either forgotten or are ignoring the dark history of Christianity’s marriage to partisan politics and nationalist agendas.

Comparing current figures and events with Nazi Germany is fraught with difficulties, but the similarities in the language and dehumanization of a people group from a leader within Christianity are too obvious to ignore. I am not saying anyone is a Nazi; however, Dobson’s rhetoric of xenophobia and nationalism in combination with Christianity is not unlike Christian pastors who supported the Nazi Party.

The closing paragraph of Dobson’s newsletter reminds me of a 1933 book by the German theologian Gerhard Kittel. The problem of the Jews living in Germany was, according to Kittel, based on the fact that they are a people perpetually in a foreign land and thus, as foreigners, they have brought decadence to Germany. In an effort to solve this “problem” from a Christian theological perspective, Kittel offers four possible solutions: 1) Extermination (which he rejects on practical, rather than moral grounds); 2) Deportation (which he also considers impractical on political grounds); 3) Assimilation (an idea abhorrent to Kittel); or 4) Separation (the only possible solution).

By advocating for the separation of the Jews in order to protect the German way of life, Kittel and other Christians were able to support the cruel and inhumane policies of the Nazi Party. They considered it their Christian duty to preserve their German way of life. Kittel even warned of becoming soft toward the Jews. Assimilation was the worst possible solution, further infecting the German culture, and was to be avoided at all costs, even if the cost was the loss of empathy and humanity. There is simply no other place to ‘house’ them.

The rhetoric of evangelicals like Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jr. or [Franklin] Jack Graham, legitimizes the dehumanizing policies of the Trump administration at the border in the name of protecting their version of American “culture.” The characterization of migrants at the border as disease-carriers, criminals, swindlers, and uneducated provides further legitimization that these are the type of people that American culture must be protected from. Thus, the policy of family separation is no longer inhumane or immoral, but, according to Dobson, the only practical solution. Evangelical Christianity has sided with the oppressor, not the oppressed.

Dobson’s views on immigration are based on his militarized evangelical masculinity. White, American, evangelical men are to protect family values at all costs. Migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador are perceived as a threat to these “family values.” The violence committed against these people is justified because the men at the border are assumed to be “hardened criminals and drug runners,” or even terrorists.

During this period in American history, Christians do well to remember the history of the church during the Nazi era and avoid the mistakes they made. Vocal supporters of the Nazis from Christian thinkers like Kittel, Walter Grundmann, or Emmanual Hirsch, are condemned from all sides for their support of the brutal treatment of the Jews.

The atrocities committed against asylum seekers are well-known and new stories are being published daily documenting the horrors of life in the camps. A recent ProPublica story uncovered a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents and documented their vile jokes about Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, who drowned in an attempt to cross the Rio Grande. Christians who see no alternatives to putting people into camps, not only lack political and theological imagination, they make these policies, behaviors, and language theologically permissible.

One can only hope decent Christians will rise up and oppose these policies and deliberate acts of cruelty. Meanwhile, one can also hope that Dobson and those like him will accelerate the extinction of evangelical Christianity in America. 

Mohammed bin Salman: America's New Saddam Hussein

Maddeningly, America rarely seems to learn from past mistakes and seems doomed to repeat past fiascoes.  The Vietnam War should have been a start warning for the USA not to launch the Iraq War, yet war mongers like Dick Cheney - who had avoided service in Vietnam himself - blindly pushed the hapless George W. Bush to launch yet another disastrous war that has squandered trillions of dollars and cost countless lives not to mention setting the stage for the disaster that is today's Middle East.  A column in the Washington Post looks at another disaster that the USA and most western nations are repeating and draws the parallels between the West's earl support of Saddam Hussein and Saudia Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman.  Simply having a perceived common enemy does NOT make one your ally, especially if that alliance requires deliberate blindness to human rights abuses and atrocities. Today's supposed expediency sets the stage for tomorrow's nightmare.  Here are column highlights:

Once upon a time, there was a brutal and reckless dictator of an oil-rich Arab country who, despite his well-documented excesses, was stroked and supported by the United States and other Western governments. His crimes were terrible, went the rationale, but he was modernizing his country and he was holding the line against Islamist jihadism and Iran. Anyway, there was probably no alternative.

The ruler heard that message. He concluded that, as long as he kept supplying oil and opposing Iran, he was free to butcher his opponents and bully his neighbors.

His name, of course, was Saddam Hussein. The bet made on him by the United States and its allies directly led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and from there to the “endless wars” in the Middle East that are now almost universally bemoaned by the West’s foreign policy establishment.

And yet, 30 years later, those mandarins and the politicians they report to are blindly repeating the mistake. They are saying they abhor the blatant crimes of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, including the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the torture and imprisonment of women seeking greater rights. They see his bombing campaign in Yemen as a war-crime-ridden disaster.

Yet, at the summit of the Group of 20 in Osaka, Japan, a week ago, they cheerfully clustered around him. Not just President Trump but also prime ministers and presidents from the big European democracies. And not just them but also the leaders of India, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have received Mohammed bin Salman warmly in the past six months.

Ask them why, and you get an all-too-familiar response: The crown prince, who is also known as MBS, is the best chance for modernization in Saudi Arabia. He’s fighting the Islamist extremists, and he’s allied with us and with Israel against Iran. The alternatives to him are worse.

[U.N. special investigator] Callamard conducted a five-month investigation into Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last October. On June 19, Callamard released a powerful report making the case that “Mr. Khashoggi has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia responsible” — and that Mohammed bin Salman was almost certainly complicit in the operation and in its subsequent coverup.

Callamard’s report called for a halt to the closed Saudi trial of 11 lower-level operatives blamed for the murder, and for an independent investigation by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, or the FBI. The report also called for sanctions to be imposed on Mohammed bin Salman and his foreign assets “until and unless evidence is provided and corroborated that he carries no responsibility for this execution.”

At the G-20 summit, Trump met Mohammed bin Salman for breakfast and declared he was doing “a spectacular job.” Later, [Trump] the president answered a question about Khashoggi by saying there was no “finger directly” pointing at the crown prince — though both Callamard’s report and a CIA assessment have done just that.

Trump notwithstanding, she is counting on justice to come from the United States. “I think this is the only place where political accountability is going to work,” she said during a meeting at The Post.

There is still some hope of that: Legislation pending in the House would require the director of national intelligence to report on those responsible for the Khashoggi murder, and would require a visa ban to be applied to them. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to consider other bills this week. But as long as Trump is president, Mohammed bin Salman is unlikely to face direct U.S. sanction . . .

Like Saddam Hussein before him, Mohammed bin Salman has concluded that he is immune. Women he ordered tortured are still in prison. His planes are still bombing Yemen. And he is taking the first steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Because Western governments do not stop him now, they will have to do it later — when the cost is likely to be far higher.

Those who do not know history - or, in this case, who choose to ignore it - are doomed to repeat it, often with even worse consequences down the road.  Saudi Arabia is NOT America's ally and MBS is no friend to decent moral people. 

It’s the Cruelty, Stupid

There are several characteristics that link Donald Trump to his hard core supporters. The first two are related: hatred towards others and a willingness - perhaps even a delight - in inflicting cruelty on these that they see as "other."  These traits are true of white supremacists and for evangelical Christian extremists as well as ultra-far right Catholics.  A third trait applies to some of my affluent Republican "friends" who are indifferent to the hate and cruelty that motivates the hard core Trump base: for them support of Trump comes from greed.  Greed in the form of wanting to avoid taxes at any cost, including countenancing cruelty to others and allowing the less fortunate to suffer. Nowhere do any of these Trump supporters embrace Christ's social gospel message.  They may feign piety and religiosity, but to the extent they do so, it is to parse Old Testament passages to condemn others while preening in their own self-bestowed self-righteousness. Am I too harsh?  I think not and, as a column in the New York Times notes, history will judge Trump and his followers harshly.  But the rest of us will be judged too based on how vigorously we opposed hate and cruelty and whether we spoke out against cruelty or simply looked the other way.  Here are column highlights:

There are tanks in the nation’s capital and concentration camps on its border. The slide of this nation into a nearly unrecognizable state continues unabated. Donald Trump is recreating America in his own image: an abominable one.

He brags about trading valentines with the ruthless North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, saying at a political rally in September: “I was really being tough. And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love, O.K.? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.. . . .

According to Human Rights Watch, North Korea under Kim not only “restricts all civil and political liberties, including freedom of expression, assembly, association and religion,” it systematically extracts “forced, unpaid labor from its citizens,” and “women in North Korea suffer a range of sexual and gender-based abuses” that include “rape and other sexual violence and torture in detention facilities, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage of North Korean women in China, and sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination.”

And this says nothing of the hundreds of people Kim is thought to have had executed since coming to power in 2011.

And this is the man that the president of the United States brags about being in love with.

Last month Trump joked with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about getting “rid of journalists.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 28 journalists have been killed in Russia since Putin took office in 2000.

Last week in Osaka, Japan, Trump said of the Saudi crown prince: “It’s an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia.”

Let’s be clear: That friend is believed to have ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And, murder may in fact be too antiseptic a word. Turkish officials claim that after Khashoggi was killed, his body was hacked up with a bone saw, then disposed of.

Not only has Trump never delivered a full-throated condemnation of the Saudi leader, he plans to reward the kingdom with more arms sales unless Congress is able to stop him.

Why does the American president have such an affinity, a fetish even, for the world’s dictators while at the same time spurning many of America’s traditional allies? And how does this turn to the darkness reposition this country in the annals of history?

I believe that it speaks to a blindness, or more precisely, an indifference to cruelty. This also crops up in domestic policy, where the indifference is particularly acute when those who suffer are somehow other: black or brown, female or trans, Muslim or migrant.

I do not believe that a parent seeking asylum — which is still legal in this country, it bears repeating — should have a child ripped from his or her arms. I don’t believe that people — including children — should be caged like animals and deprived of basic human necessities and basic human dignity.

What is happening at our border is unconscionable, a violation of basic human rights, a complete moral violation. And yet the president on Thursday will make a mockery of the country’s freedom celebration by turning it into a muscle-flexing political pep rally.

Stop thinking that this is only about partisanship or polarization. It’s the cruelty, stupid. It has always been about cruelty: racial cruelty, gender cruelty, religious cruelty. It has always been about bending the rest of America, the rest of reality, really, into subordination to the white supremacist patriarchy.

If the emerging culture of the world has to be put under boot for the established culture to maintain power, so be it. This is the white supremacist mantra; this is the Trump message.

Trump cares nothing about the suffering of racial minorities here — other than to increase the pain — nor does he care about the suffering of nonwhite people abroad.

[H]istory is sitting in judgment, that when this dark era draws to a close, an accounting must be made, a record made. None of us will be immune.

The questions will come without room for equivocation or adjustment: Where were you when the bodies floated in the Rio Grande? What did you say when this president bragged about assaulting women and defended men accused of doing the same? What was your reaction when he saw very good people among the Nazis? Where was your outrage when thousands died in Puerto Rico?

What did you do? What did you say? And for others in my profession, what did you write?

I for one, will not be silent.  Would that I could do more to rid America of the pestilence that Trump and his supporters comprise. Will my Republican "friends" like this post?  Probably not, but until they take a good look at themselves in the mirror and reject these enumerated traits, America will continue its decline and degradation.  If they vote to re-elect Trump next year, I hope history will be most cruel in it judgment of them.  

Saudi Arabia Brutality and Trump's Love of Autocrats

Last week I wrote about the latest Saudi Arabia brutality and that autocratic theocracy's latest spat with Canada because of Canadian condemnation of Saudi human rights abuses.  In his weekly column, Andrew Sullivan expands on coverage and notes distressingly how Saudi brutality and human rights abuses has not disturbed the Trump/Pence regime and Trump has remained silent on Saudi misdeeds.  Indeed, Sullivan suggests - correctly in my view - that Trump admires autocratic regimes and, in my view, longs to rule America in a similar manner.  Frighteningly, I suspect such brutal authoritarian rule would be applauded by much of Trump's base so long as the brutality was targeted at blacks, Hispanics, gays and non-right wing Christians. Despite its ugly history - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, etc. - America had achieved moral authority in the world.  Now, that moral authority has been thrown away by Trump/Pence and that regime's evangelical Christian and white supremacist base.  Here are column highlights:

It wasn’t so long ago that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman o[“MBS”] of Saudi Arabia was doing the rounds of various American muckety-mucks in business, politics, and pop culture. On his world tour, the fawning was extraordinary. He met Oprah and the Rock, Bloomberg and the Clintons, Bush after Bush, Gates and Bezos, Hollywood moguls and Wall Street machers, as well as his plutocratic wing man, Jared Kushner. . . . . the general tenor of the public-relations campaign was that of a Saudi spring, especially for women, and a thawing of some of the most repressive theocratic tendencies of the regime.

So it must come as a surprise to all of MBS’s friends in the American elite that this youthful reformer returned from his Western tour and soon launched a new campaign against the very women who had most fervently resisted the theocracy’s misogyny. On May 19, “the Saudi Arabian authorities and government-aligned media launched a public smear campaign to try to discredit six prominent detained women’s rights defenders as ‘traitors’ following their arrest. 

This campaign was completed last week with the detention of the last two prominent women’s rights activists, Nassima al-Sada and Samar Badawi. Badawi is the sister of a Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who set up an open forum website and was therefore lashed a thousand times in public and is currently serving a prison term of ten years. Both women have been persecuted for years.  In response to the latest crackdown, the Canadian government tweeted its concern: “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights advocates in #SaudiArabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, spoke out in part because Raif Badawi’s wife and three kids now live in Canada, and have been citizens since July.

In response, MBS has thrown a hissy fit of Trumpian proportions. The Canadian ambassador was given 24 hours to leave; 15,000 Saudi students in Canada were recalled home; trade with Canada was suspended; an order to sell all Saudi central bank and state pension fund shares in Canadian interests was proclaimed, according to the Financial Times. Saudi subjects receiving medical treatment in Canada are being transferred out of care, and about 800 Saudi medical residents and fellows in Canada have been ordered home.

As a kind of coda to the entire affair, the Saudis decided to, yes, crucify a criminal this week, a rare but gruesome spectacle, in which someone’s executed corpse is hung out in the open as a warning to others. You may remember such scenes from Game of Thrones. But this kind of barbarism still exists — and the regime that behaves this way has [Trump's] our president’s full support, and billions in arms sales.

Then, of course, there is the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The crown prince has been waging a brutal war on the Shi’a of Yemen, the Houthis, in coalition with the U.S. and the U.K. The relentless bombing campaigns — including indiscriminate attacks on civilians — have killed thousands, uprooted more, and generated famine and disease. This week in the horror show saw the Saudi coalition forces bomb a bus of schoolkids, many under the age of 10. A little under 30 children were killed, . . . And this record of regional mayhem doesn’t even count the time when MBS decided it would be a great idea to invade Qatar, another U.S. ally.

It’s at this point that you begin to absorb quite how indifferent the Trump administration is to any concept of human rights. Trump’s initial response to the Saudi attacks on Qatar was to endorse them enthusiastically (even as what was left of the State Department tried to keep the peace). And his administration’s response to the Saudi assault on Canada is to take no side in the dispute. Between a barbaric absolute monarchy that jails and tortures dissidents, obliterates women’s opportunity, and crucifies criminals in the streets … and Canada, for Pete’s sake, Trump cannot pick a side. 

Despite no official relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, MBS and Netanyahu are now joined at the hip with Trump because they all want a war against Iran (and are having considerable success laying the groundwork). The Saudis are also useful to the Israelis as a way to delegitimize any genuine form of Palestinian self-determination — because the Saudis have been prepared to throw their Arab neighbors under the bus in order to fight a regime in Tehran that MBS has said “makes Hitler look good.” Trump’s hatred of Iran and Kushner’s hopes for Israel’s expansion keep this unholy trinity together. The idea that either Trump or his mute dauphin give a hoot about human rights is preposterous. The more brutal a regime’s human rights abuses are, the more likely it is that Trump admires it.

Canada will survive, of course, despite the intense international bullying from the Saudis, and America’s and Britain’s abandonment of their ally. Canada will even survive Trump (though whether America does is another matter). But to watch the West disintegrate as a moral force, even on a purely rhetorical level, is beyond depressing. And yet it appears to be our future. It’s also a much darker one for every dissident in every political prison across the planet.

Be very afraid.

GOP Mega-Donor: Not a Penny Until "DACA" is Resolved

While Der Trumpenführer and his base love to trash non-whites and immigrants - indeed, the family separation policy has been ruled a human rights violation - some major Republicans campaign donors appear to be growing tired of the demagoguery and outright cruelty.   One such individual is Mike Fernandez, a billionaire Florida health care mogul and Republican mega-donor, who says he will cut off all contributions to elected officials and candidates who refuse to fix America’s immigration laws. Trashing Hispanics and cruel and inhuman policies may play well with Trump's white evangelical Christian base, but many business owners are aware of the damage being done to various industries - and even many small towns with immigrant labor reliant economies - that rely on immigrant labor.  Now, these donors are pressing Republicans to pass immigration  reform.  Here are highlights from Politico: 

Mike Fernandez, long at odds with President Donald Trump over deportations, told POLITICO in a phone interview he’s behind a broadening strategy among donors to punish politicians who will not sign a discharge petition in the House that would trigger a congressional showdown over the fate of hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers.

“Over the last 10 years, the Republican Party has received $47 million from me, in state, gubernatorial and party contributions,” Fernandez said. “I’m not writing one penny to any of them anymore.”

The Cuban-born Fernandez is one of a growing number of GOP donors who are demanding Congress take action on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump canceled last year. Last week, former Exelon chairman John Rowe and Weather Tech CEO David MacNeil told POLITICO they would curb resources to Republicans over the issue.

Fernandez said Tuesday he’s enlisted dozens of businesspeople in Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee who “will abide by that commitment,” and close up their pocketbooks to politicians who won’t take action on DACA. He implored House Speaker Paul Ryan to “get a backbone” and allow a debate on immigration to advance to the chamber’s floor. As of Tuesday, just three more signatures were needed on the discharge petition.

No one should have the authority to prohibit a debate on the House floor,” Fernandez said. “And that is exactly what Speaker Ryan has done in the House. I have been a supporter of Speaker Ryan, I think he’s playing chicken and needs to get a backbone.”

In his capacity as co-chair of the American Business Immigration Coalition, Fernandez recently authored an open letter to House Republicans declaring “DACA discharge is our litmus for giving.”

We cannot sit idly by. We urge you to join your 23 GOP House colleagues to sign H Res. 744, a DACA discharge petition filed by Representative Carlos Curbelo (R-FL).Last September, President Trump revoked DACA, putting the lives of 800,000 dreamers, their families and their employers in limbo. We urge you to sign H Res. 744 to provide our Dreamers the opportunity to continue to invest their talents in our economy, our military and our country.”

Others donors who have added their names to the letter and who have collectively donated millions of dollars to GOP candidates, include Dr. Zachariah Zachariah of the University of Miami Health System; Coastal Construction CEO Tom Murphy Jr.; Century Homebuilders Group CEO Sergio Pino; Carnival Cruise Lines former CEO Bob Dickinson; and Enrique Sosa, a retired senior vice president of Dow Chemical Company.

Fernandez is right:  Paul Ryan is a despicable individual who is morally bankrupt despite his pretense of being a "devout Catholic." 

British Court: U.S. Prison System is a Human Rights Violation

British High Court building.

The United States is known among developed nations for its broken and insanely expensive health care system where millions are deprived of appropriate health care access. Now, a British court has highlighted another broken aspect of America: our broken prison and criminal justice system.  America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with minorities disproportionately represented thanks to draconian laws, lack of first class legal representation for many defendants, and an increasingly privatized prison system where a drive for profits overshadows non-barbaric conditions for inmates.  (In Virginia, archaic marijuana laws help disenfranchise minorities of their voting rights which, unlike as is the case in most other states are not reinstated once sentences are fully served.) With Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeking to reignite the failed war on drugs and calls for stiffer sentencing - which aids Sessions' goal of disenfranchising minorities - the situation will likely worsen.  But back to the British court ruling which refused to send defendants to the United States because it found that America's penal system is a human rights violation.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the stunning ruling.  Here are excerpts: 

President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have repeatedly highlighted the importance of international cooperation in tackling international, cyber and cross-border crime. But as a decision of the United Kingdom’s High Court on Monday shows, human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system are putting that cooperation at risk even with our closest allies. In the ruling, the High Court refused to order the extradition of British-Finnish activist Lauri Love to the United States, where he is wanted on hacking charges, on the grounds that sending him to an American jail would be “oppressive” due to poor conditions there. The court accordingly found that the interests of justice required the case to be prosecuted in Britain instead. This decision marks the first time a U.K. court has used the “forum bar,” a 2013 extradition reform that allows British courts to halt extraditions in situations where defendants could be prosecuted instead in the United Kingdom.  The U.K. Parliament adopted the forum bar after an outcry over a stringof cases in which the United States asserted prosecutorial jurisdiction over conduct that occurred entirely in the U.K. Although several political factors were at play, the extradition reform movement was largely fueled by public concern that defendants’ basic rights will not be respected in U.S. custody. The findings of the High Court in Love’s case paint an unembellished but unmistakably grim portrait of the reality of the American carceral state, in which harsh sentences, poor access to medical care and excessive use of solitary confinement mean that U.S. authorities cannot reliably ensure the survival of vulnerable prisoners. In finding that extradition to the United States would be “oppressive” to Love, the High Court found that conditions in American jails were “not adequate to prevent suicide.” The court found that Love, who has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers from severe depression and other health problems, was likely to be held in solitary confinement as a suicide prevention measure and that he wouldn’t have adequate access to mental health treatment. The court also found that the heightened risk that Love would commit suicide was due in part to the excessive length of sentence Love anticipated in the United States, substantially longer than what he would be subject to in a prosecution for similar crimes in the U.K. In short, the court found that the U.S. prison system is a mortal threat.

All of the issues flagged by the High Court — poor treatmentfor the majority of prisoners who suffer from mental illness, sentences far longer than those in other countries, and excessive use of solitary confinement — are sadly well-documented realities for many prisoners in the United States. The High Court’s conclusion that U.S. authorities can’t reliably prevent suicide for prisoners such as Love is borne out by the fact that suicide is the third-leading cause of death in U.S. prisons and jails — and has risen sharply in recent years.

When the United States can’t assure its closest allies that their citizens will be fairly treated in criminal proceedings, our domestic human rights crises do more than ruin lives — they undermine international cooperation and public safety. Defendants such as Love, who are vulnerable to illness and violence, are prosecuted and imprisoned every single day in the United States. The fact that a British court has found that the United States can’t be entrusted to keep such people alive in custody is at once shocking and undeniable. [T]here is no indication that respect for the rights of the accused is likely to improve under Sessions’ Justice Department, despite sustained state- and national-level movements for reform. In fact, Sessions has signaled that he is doubling down on punitive prosecutorial practices that will exacerbate the human rights crises in U.S. jails and prisons. Unless it changes course, the United States will likely have to accept further blows to its ability to cooperate with its allies in its efforts to tackle international crime.

France's New President (Unlike Trump) Stands Up to Putin

I have always liked France and the French, perhaps because I am part French due to my grandmother's New Orleans French ancestry, my knowledge of French history and love of Paris, and knowledge that but for France and the French fleet, American forces would likely have been defeated at the battle of Yorktown (where we were yesterday for a wedding in a Revolutionary era B&B).  Now, France's newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, has added to the list of reasons to admire France.  In his first meeting with Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, Macron stood up to Putin and even challenged him over the anti-gay pogroms that are ongoing in Chechnya.  Donald Trump, in contrast, has more or less kissed Putin's ass and seemingly acted on Putin's script to damage U.S. - European relations.  A piece in Politico looks at Macron's impressive performance.  Here are highlights:

The official line on the first meeting between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin was that it was “frank” and “open” and covered Syria, Ukraine and a host of other topics — but the differences between the two leaders were plain to see.

The new French president struck a firm, at times defiant tone. There was even a flash of anger when the subject of election hacking was brought up. He said Russian state-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik “did not behave like press outlets, but behaved like agents of influence and propaganda” which spread “serious falsehoods.” “I will never give in to that,” he said while standing next to Putin.

There were less awkward moments. Speaking to journalists at the Versailles palace, the two leaders said they had agreed to restart talks on Ukraine in the “coming days and weeks” under the so-called Normandy format — referring to four-way consultations between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany that have been paused.

“No essential topic can be addressed without dialogue with Russia,” Macron said during their joint news conference in the Gallery of Battlesk, a huge gilded hall covered in paintings depicting scenes of war. “It was a frank exchange, extremely direct … We share disagreements, but we also see how to construct a common action.”

While Putin was granted a statesman’s welcome in grand surroundings, at times he looked uncomfortable during his brief appearance with Macron in front of journalists.

The Russian leader, who had not been to France since 2015, offered brief answers to just four questions from some 200 journalists in the room, dismissing one about election meddling as something that “does not exist.”

The only time he went into anything approaching detail was to offer a defense of his decision to meet far-right leader Marine Le Pen during France’s presidential campaign — a meeting he said had been initiated by the National Front leader.

Macron, just back from a G7 meeting in Sicily, wasn’t so shy about speaking out. On Syria, he said “any use of chemical weapons” would prompt an “armed response,” and added that France would “remain vigilant” on human rights issues including abuses of gay people in Chechnya and the treatment of non-governmental organizations in Russia.

Macron’s team wanted Putin to feel more welcome than challenged. They used an exhibit on Peter the Great’s 1717 visit to Versailles as an excuse to invite Putin to France, a move that was both deliberate and designed to speak to Putin’s notions of his own importance.

Macron aides insisted on the need to re-establish a working relationship after a bad patch in Franco-Russia ties under his predecessor François Hollande.

“This is a new departure in our relations,” Russia’s ambassador to Paris, Alexandre Orlov, told the RIA Novosti agency. “It seems that between Macron and Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], there are many common points, and they should be able to understand each other well.”

France, unlike America at the moment, has a president who is intelligent, informed, and concerned with more that fanning his own insatiable ego.  Then, of course, there is the issue that unlike Trump, Macron was not put in office thanks to Russian electoral subterfuge and sabotage.