To Black Americans...And Every Other Citizen
Politics
A.J. DiCintio, Featured Writer
January 3, 2008
For years some black VIP’s have insisted upon anointing Bill Clinton “America’s first black President.” In fact, these elites are so determined to have the nation accept their claim that one of them recently asserted not only that “Bill is every bit as black as Barack” but also that the former president has “probably gone with more black women than Barack.”
That last statement deserves a thorough condemnation because it reveals how politicians will obscenely insult even their sisters and brothers for the love of power. But today I’m asking black Americans and every other citizen to spend a few minutes examining the validity of the whole “black” business about Bill Clinton, especially because the VIP’s mentioned above are asking voters to transfer Bill Clinton’s “admirable blackness” to his wife Hillary.
So, let me get right to it by asking everyone to be honest about what would happen to the political standing of any president who did absolutely nothing, including speaking not a word, while 800,000 human beings were slaughtered in an astonishingly efficient 100 day genocide — in Great Britain, Ireland, Italy or Mexico.
We need only be truthful about America’s ethnic and political realities to know what would happen. Yet the fact is that “America’s first black president” did absolutely nothing – including speaking not a word – as in Rwanda of 1994 8,000 black men, women, and children were brutally murdered every day for 100 consecutive days.
Moreover, and unbelievably, that “black” president compounded the injury caused by his abject political cowardice when, four years later, he delivered a vile insult not only to the memory of the 800,000 murdered souls but also to every living Rwandan Tutsi, every one of their brave Hutu friends, and every other black person in the world when at Rwanda’s Kigali Airport he uttered the following lie directly to the faces of human beings he hadn’t deemed worthy of a single word, let alone a speech of many powerful words delivered at the UN:
All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.
Now, I’m not asking anyone to listen only to me about one of the ugliest lies ever spoken by an American politician. But I am asking everyone to listen to people such as Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who testified about the Rwandan genocide before Congress and who wrote as follows in “Bystanders to Genocide” published in The Atlantic:
[Clinton’s lie at the Kigali Airport] implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term “genocide,” for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing “to try to limit what occurred.” Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.
I am asking everyone to listen to people such as writer David Corn, who immediately after Clinton’s photo-op stop in Rwanda echoed Ms. Power’s points about what Mr. Clinton knew in “Lying About Genocide” (Salon, March 30, 1998), ending his admirable piece with the following observation:
During his brief stopover in Rwanda -- he never left the airport -- Clinton announced that the United States would contribute $2 million to a survivor’s fund. That’s $4 for each Rwandan slaughtered while Clinton stood by and did nothing.
And regarding Hillary Clinton, I am asking everyone to listen to people such as Patrick Healy, who in the New York Times recently wrote as follows regarding Mrs. Clinton’s “strength and experience” factor:
She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.
Trusting in the ability of ordinary Americans to think for themselves, I’ll not go on about what their cowardly silence before and during the Rwanda Genocide and their cold-hearted lies afterward say about the Clintons. I will, however, once again ask Americans to consider the full implications of these questions:
What would rightly happen to the political standing of any president if he did absolutely nothing, including speaking not a word, while 800,000 human beings were slaughtered in a 100 day genocide — in Great Britain or Ireland or Italy or Mexico?
What would rightly happen to the political standing of any president if in a brief stopover in London, Dublin, Rome, or Mexico City he failed even to lay a wreath at a memorial to the slain, so eager was he to avoid any connection with those nations?
What would rightly happen to the political standing of the presidential candidate wife of the aforementioned president who touts herself as a person of vast “experience” and as “an agent of change” when the truth is that with respect to Rwanda (and so much else) she willingly embraced the See No Evil/Hear No Evil/Speak No Evil expediency demanded by Politics as Usual, easily and casually casting aside her “devotion” to the world’s suffering souls and her oft-repeated “commitment” to the principle that in world affairs the United States ought to mobilize the power of the International Community?
Black Americans have a special personal and emotional interest in those questions. But they have a pragmatic interest in them as well because the questions prompt other thoughts. For example, is Hillary Clinton likely to exhibit political bravery regarding school choice and other real education reforms; or does history show that she will bow before powerful unions and other special interests and do as much for America’s black children (and, therefore, the future of black America) as she did for Rwanda’s.
As for the rest of the American family, the profound nature of the moral and the practical implications of the questions is clear to all with minds wide open.
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A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up. Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and polished by experience, to social/political affairs.
