Obama’s Human Rights Disaster

By: Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine.com:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration.

FP: Elliott Abrams, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about America’s human rights policy under Obama.

What is Obama’s human rights policy exactly? The recent visit to the U.S. of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was kind of illuminating in this context, yes?

Abrams: It seems clear to me that the Obama Administration has no human rights policy.  That is, while in some inchoate sense they would like respect for human rights to grow around the world, as all Americans would, they have no actual policy to achieve that goal– and they subordinate it to all their other policy goals.

In the Middle East, for example, they have decided to go for an Israeli-Palestinian deal at all costs.  That means our relations with Egypt (and Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc.) are all about Israeli-Palestinian matters, not about Egypt itself as a country. Human rights and democracy in Egypt become a small issue, a side issue.

The Mubarak visit was illuminating, as was the President’s choice of Cairo to give his speech a few months ago, for Obama pretty much forgot about freedom.  He did not utter the word (or words like democracy, human rights, free elections) sitting there next to Mubarak at the White House.  Democracy activists in Egypt have been abandoned.

Clinton’s remarks about China are another example.  Mitchell’s visits to Syria are yet another: dead silence about human rights, smiles at dictators.  That’s the norm.

FP: What are the consequences of this lack of a human rights policy?

Abrams: There are four major ones.

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