Prior to the US president’s meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz last week, Amnesty International urged Barack Obama to tackle the kingdom’s human rights record, suggesting that he use a female driver during his visit. That call was supported by 52 bipartisan US lawmakers and the US-based NGO Freedom House. My visceral reaction to that news was “Who the heck do they think they are!” Haven’t they heard the expression ‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?’
The so-called leader of the free world was prudent enough to keep his wagging finger out of sight during his one-day fence-mending trip to Riyadh but over the years the Obama administration has admonished China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Egypt, Cambodia, Myanmar, India, France and even Denmark over their alleged infringements of human rights. Fair enough, if such criticisms had come from someone whose own country’s record was beyond reproach or whose personal decision-making untarnished! That’s not the case in this instance, as attested by a scathing new report by the UN’s human rights committee chaired by a British law professor.
The report slams the US for its programme of targeted assassinations using pilotless drone aircraft, its failure to close Guantanamo and reluctance to investigate torture of detainees during the Bush era. Also denounced was the US Justice System’s discrimination against African-Americans and Hispanics, conditions experienced by those on death row, the imposition of solitary confinement on minors as well as people suffering from mental illnesses and the criminalisation of homeless people for merely sitting in public places. The New York Police Department attracted the committee’s particular attention for its monitoring of the Muslim community and for its general use of racial profiling.
Loathsome treatment
“The US is adept at demanding human rights change from other governments while failing to meet international standards itself,” said Amnesty International’s representative at the UN Jose Luis Diaz in response to the report. True, but why did Amnesty lobby Obama to do just that in Saudi Arabia?
Unless America can clean up its own act, its officials have no moral right to lecture others. Putting aside the fact that its military has killed more civilians than any other nation and is the only one to have dropped an atomic bomb on a population, its treatment of detainees is loathsome. I will never forget that Afghan prisoners were stuffed into airless containers, so thirsty that they licked the condensation on the walls before being shot under the watch of American troops or that an injured unarmed Iraqi prisoner was shot dead like a dog while lying on the floor of a mosque in Fallujah. And who in the world could forget the physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by US military personnel on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib! America’s human rights record in the 20th and 21st centuries was and is still abysmal. Most non-Americans believe racial discrimination at state level ended in the 1960s. However, studies show that discrimination against African-Americans is alive and well; they are 33 per cent more likely to endure pre-trial detentions and are sentenced to serve 10 years more, on average, than Caucasians committing similar crimes. A Princeton sociology study indicated almost 50 percent more African-American job applicants were unsuccessful as opposed to similarly qualified whites.
Permitting 46.5 million Americans to live in poverty while Obama merrily hands out one billion dollars to bolster Ukraine’s basket case economy purely for geopolitical motivations could also be viewed as a breach of rights. Doesn’t charity begin at home? Last year, the National Law Centre on Homelessness and Poverty revealed that 1,750,000 US citizens were homeless. And despite the fact that African Americans make up just 13 per cent of the US population, they comprise 50 per cent of the homeless.
A hot button issue in 2014 is the soaring number of undocumented immigrants being deported from the US regardless of whether they have close family members who are US citizens. Under Obama’s watch almost two million have been deported; parents have been split from their children, students forced out of college. The head of one Latino advocacy group has dubbed Obama “Deporter-in-Chief.” Over 750 individuals awaiting deportation in a Washington detention centre are on hunger strike. Yet, didn’t we hear the US president pontificating on the ideals of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights before a youthful European audience last week? “Instead of fearing the immigrant, we can welcome him,” he said. Hundreds of young people, whose lives were cruelly interrupted, are campaigning along the Mexican side of the US border appealing to Obama to welcome them back.
Obama should take a long hard look in the mirror before condemning others. Amnesty International needs to be consistent if it’s to be taken seriously. As for the US Congress, its members would do well to clean up the mess in their own constituencies before telling countries thousands of kilometres away how to conduct their affairs. “We are all Ukrainian,” announced the perennial pot stirrer Senator John McCain recently. I’ll bet there are plenty of disenchanted Americans existing from hand to mouth who wish they were.
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.
“Unless America can clean up its own act, its officials have no moral right to lecture others.” Amen!