The Obama Administration Remains Silent over Egypt’s Tyrannical Imprisonment of Three Al Jazeera Journalists — Business as Usual for America’s Pet Totalitarian Regimes

09 June 2014

President Obama talks a good line, but his actions routinely betray his disinterest in doing anything that requires political courage in support of justice and freedom

I doubt that Sweden’s Nobel Committee as ever awarded its Peace Prize to a more hypocritical enemy of it:

It’s a scene out of a journalist’s nightmare. You wake up one day in a cage, your civilian’s clothes swapped for prison garb. A few feet away men and women argue over how long you should be put away for the crime of doing your job.

That’s where three Al-Jazeera journalists—Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed—found themselves Thursday during a trial in which the prosecutor claimed that, as The New York Times reports, “they had facilitated terrorism and sought the downfall of the Egyptian state by reporting” on developments in the country’s political situation before their arrest last year.

One wonders where is the outrage from leaders around the world and from major Western editors, publishers and broadcasters.

[W]ould-be human rights champions President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton so far appear to be silent.

Egypt remains in thrall to Saudi Arabia, a repressive theocracy supported by the United States.

It is through these relationships that the Obama administration tacitly supports the corruption of democracy and the suppression of the press in Egypt and other Arab countries, which become the U.S.’ dependent and willing client states.

The moral? — America’s outrage in regard to suppressed freedom only applies when the oppressor is one of our more conveniently situated scapegoats

On the one hand, we like to excoriate Russia’s actions in the Ukraine — conveniently suppressing the fact that our own, essentially territory-grabbing actions drove President Putin into acting as he has.

On the other, in Egypt, we remain silent. With dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sissi now in charge, the United States is apparently happy to return to its accustomed equanimity with Arabs oppressing other Arabs:

Abdel Fattah el-Sissi was inaugurated Sunday as Egypt's eighth president, less than a year after he helped oust the country's first freely elected leader, Islamist Mohamed Morsi.

Last month's election, which officials said Sissi won with 97 percent of the vote, followed three years of upheaval since a popular uprising ended 30 years of rule by former air force commander Hosni Mubarak.

The harm of our silence — in objecting toward both the reimposition of Egyptian military despotism and its casually tolerated jailing of journalists — lies in that fact that the imprisoned Al Jazeera news people were simply trying to tell the rest of the world what was going on in Egypt.

The same “we don’t care” message applies to our own press, which is too complacent to recognize that its freedom is potentially also at stake.

PeteFree.com

The Obama Administration Remains Silent over Egypt’s Tyrannical Imprisonment of Three Al Jazeera Journalists — Business as Usual for America’s Pet Totalitarian Regimes