By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, Georgia | 20 July 2024 (IDN) — Samantha Power is a moral coward and a disgrace to the US. She should resign as head of USAID. Anyone who has read her famous book on genocide, A Problem From Hell, knows that she is a fierce opponent of genocides past, but is sanguine about those going on right now or have been going on for such a long time that they can be safely ignored.
Her work, celebrated as courageous and brilliant, catapulted her into high profile jobs in government and on the world stage at the UN. However, there’s always been something confusing about the way her book completely ignored the long-running ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a continuing high-profile drama that has occupied most of the past century.
You will look in vain for the word “Palestine” in her book; the name Israel occurs in only one paragraph. It’s not as if all the other cases of genocide she mentioned were officially declared so by the International Court of Justice and the UN. They were not, because those legal niceties take years.
And it cannot be that she might possibly still influence the Biden-Blinken policy decision to support Israel Uber Alles, because that ship has sailed. Her time to resign in protest was when the vindictive war on Gaza’s civilians became evident. Now it is too late—she’s an accomplice. Even if she acts now at this late hour she cannot save her reputation, but she might still save her soul.
Once it was clear which side of Israel’s bloody extermination campaign President Biden was on–especially when he flew to Israel to embrace Netanyahu and throw his full weight behind the murderous Israeli attack on the civilians of Gaza—Power should have shown her vaunted courage by resigning her post as head of USAID.
The idea that by staying in her post Ms. Power might still speak truth to the White House after so many months of bloodshed is illogical to the point of being ridiculous.
Mute in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault
Instead, nine months later, she stands mute in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault. Tens of thousands of civilians have already been killed. Other families are being deliberately and methodically bombed day by day in Israel’s bloodthirsty campaign, still backed by the United States.
Millions of hapless Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza—all civilians–are facing famine and disease right now, with children and women suffering most.
Where is Power’s principled opposition to the bloodthirsty leaders of Netanyahu’s Israel, who have turned the Gaza strip into the Middle East’s own killing fields? Why has she not stood up against and refused on principle to follow President Biden, Kamala Harris, and Secretary of State Blinken’s richly deserved descent into the annals of infamy?
By now numerous State and Defense Department officials, including several principled members of the US military forces, have resigned. Why shouldn’t she resign too?
The answer is that she has consistently been both a militarist-interventionist on the model of Henry Kissinger and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (presumably to defend people’s rights by killing some of them) and a card-carrying Zionist, as witnessed by the host of key, enthusiastic American Zionist endorsements for Obama’s posting her to the United States’ top UN job.
But despite her lofty pretense of opposing genocide, she is really a party apparatchik and a policy pushover when it comes to actually doing anything about it.
No one in official Washington over the past fifty years has received more dazzling praise or gained more honors than Samantha Power. And absolutely no one has shown greater cowardice or remained silent in the face of egregious US war crimes in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and now for many months in Gaza.
At the beginning of the “war” on Gaza—which is more like shooting fish in a barrel than a war because it is so lopsided–Biden and Blinken said in effect to Israel’s leaders, “Don’t kill civilians—and by the way, here’s money and ammunition to do it with.”
With crowds of mostly young protesters on university campuses and in the streets of the US chanting, “Genocide Joe has got to go!” the future of the Biden Administration looked doubtful indeed, even before his disastrous June 27 debate performance.
The world is not blind, and the world is not amused. If the head of USAID—an organization pledged to help the world’s neediest and most helpless people—cannot stand up on moral principle and say no to genocide—who can? Samantha, along with “Genocide Joe,” must go.
*James E. Jennings, PhD, is a longtime advocate for Palestinian human rights and for greater understanding of the Middle East by Americans. He is president of Conscience International and Executive Director of US Academics for Peace. A former professor of Middle East History, he has appeared frequently on CNN, FOX News, Al-Jazeera, and other media in the US and abroad. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Photo: Samantha Power currently serves in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s premier international development agency. Source: samanthapower.com
