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Thursday, August 6, 2015

What's He Thinking?

Molly Hemmingway calls our attention to something President Obama said recently to a group of young African leaders. The president was told by a woman from Kenya that
Persons with albinism in Africa are being killed and their body parts harvested for ritual purposes. My request to you is to raise this issue with heads of state of African countries to bring these atrocities to an end.
According to Hemmingway, "Obama decried the practice and went on to encourage the young people to do everything in their power to fight on the behalf of vulnerable humans."

She quotes him as follows:
Young people, you can lead the way and set a good example. But it requires some courage because the old thinking, people will push back at you and if you don’t have convictions and courage to be able stand up for what you think is right, then cruelty will perpetuate itself. If there’s one thing I want YALI leaders to come out with, it’s the notion of you are strong by taking care of the people who are vulnerable, by looking after the minority, looking after the disabled, looking after the vulnerable. You’re not strong by putting people down you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s the measure of a leader.
Obama also tied the practice of harvesting organs from albinos with racism and discrimination against gay people, Hemmingway writes, and urged consistency in how they view the sanctity of human life if they want to complain about human rights abuses.

Good advice. He should take it. It's hardly consistent of him to utter these words to his African audience while remaining silent and tacitly supportive of Planned Parenthood and the slaughter of unborn children in this country. Does he not realize that everything he said in the quote above applies with at least equal force to the practice of abortion and the sale of fetal body parts?

Hemmingway goes on to say that:
In 2012, Planned Parenthood said, while announcing a $1.4 million ad buy on his behalf, that they had “ no greater champion” than President Obama. During his time in the Illinois Senate, Obama’s devotion to abortion was so extreme that he argued a form of infanticide should remain legal out of fear that protecting infants born alive might somehow protect young humans in the womb.
I don't wish to call the president obtuse or hypocritical, but surely he's tone deaf to the significance of his own words. During his Iran speech at American University yesterday the president accused opponents of the deal of making "common cause" with Iranian hardliners who also want the deal to fail. This is a ridiculous accusation. As David Harsanyi observes, according to the president's logic, it follows that as a U.S. Senator Mr. Obama must have been in league with Saddam Hussein because both Hussein and Obama opposed the Iraq war.

Try to imagine what the media reaction would have been had George Bush accused Barack Obama and others of making "common cause" with Saddam Hussein. Such a charge would have been stupid then and it's no less so now.