In his speech yesterday at the United Nations, President Obama used the shooting of an unarmed African-American man in Ferguson, Missouri to note that America indignation at evil is not self-righteousness. Here is what commentator Richard Grenell, a former American U.N. official, said about the President’s comments:
"In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri: (said President Obama). Morally equating the events of Ferguson to Islamic terrorism and Russia's annexation of Crimea gives foreign diplomats from Arab countries and Russia the excuse they need to dismiss America's condemnation of their actions. For anyone thinking that President Obama didn't purposefully mean to equate the world's problems with the events in Ferguson, two sentences later Obama blamed globalization for the public's outrage in Ferguson: "And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization." Overstating America's issues doesn't make us relatable; it makes others' issues easily dismissible.
Equating a single and widely-condemned act of violence in America's heartland, one that drew the personal attention of the Attorney General of the United States and enough FBI agents to make Al Capone shudder, with the systematic, calculated, and extensive mass murders perpetrated by the Islamic thugs in Iraq is such poor judgment as to be almost beyond belief. I am not diminishing the seriousness of Michael Brown’s killing, but it is not analogous to what so-called "ISIS" is doing in the Middle East.
The Islamists, as a matter of ideology, political conviction, and religious commitment, are dedicated to executing an agenda of death, including the murder (and beheading) of small children. Here is what Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein (D-CA) says about what the Islamists are doing:
"I have a picture of what I estimate to be a 6-year-old girl in a gingham party dress, white tights, a little red band around her wrist, Mary Janes [shoes], and she's lying on the ground, and her head is gone," Feinstein said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "This could be an American child. It could be a European child. It could be a child anywhere," the chairwoman added. "This is the mentality of the group that we are so concerned with. They have killed thousands; they are marching on; they have an army; they are well organized."
A spasm of cruelty in Ferguson is not like a comprehensive program of genocide. The Russian invasion of Crimea and its threat to the Ukraine are the policies of a government, not the excesses of a single policeman. The President blurred the line between acknowledging America's imperfection, in some contexts a good thing, with the outright humiliation of our country before the world.
There is no moral equivalence between America and ISIS. Mr. Obama would affirm this, surely, but in his desperate effort to discourage criticism he plays into our adversaries' hands. Those who would highlight America's flaws either to minimize their own evil or, out of envious hostility, to tear down rather than emulate the world's greatest beacon of liberty, opportunity, and hope -- that would be the United States of America -- are wrong. President Obama seems to have internalized their criticisms, which says a lot about his approach to American foreign policy over the past nearly six years. A lot that's disturbing.
All but a relative handful of the countries represented in the United Nations are authoritarian regimes, outright dictatorships, or hereditary (even if benevolent) monarchies. Anti-Semitism, cruel religious persecution, severe political repression, systemic policies that entrench poverty, quenching or abridging all the freedoms "endowed by their Creator" to their citizens: These things constitute the normal course of events in the majority of the world’s nations, all of which, to one degree or another, regularly castigate our country.
To allow such brutes, whether in developing countries, the Communist world, or totalitarian regimes to cow America into Uriah Heepish hand-wringing is maddening. No American, and certainly no American President, should succumb to it.
