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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Ferguson and Garner Cases Hurt U.S. Foreign Policy

http://www.newsweek.com/ferguson-and-garner-cases-hurt-us-foreign-policy-289613

NEWSWEEK

Ferguson and Garner Cases Hurt U.S. Foreign Policy

By 12/5/14
John F. Kennedy was bored by civil rights. In the depths of the Cold War, his main concern—and passion—was countering the Russians. When, in the summer of 1963, the Freedom Riders were refusing to retreat from savage beatings at the hands of police in Birmingham, Alabama, the young president became annoyed. It was giving Moscow a free propaganda ride.
That’s “exactly the kind of thing the Communists use to make the United States look bad around the world,” he complained, according to his biographer Richard Reeves. The movement “was embarrassing him” on the eve of his Vienna showdown with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, making it appear that he couldn’t control events in his own country. The president turned to his civil rights adviser, Harris Wofford, and complained about the Freedom Riders. “Stop them!” he demanded. “Get your friends off those buses.” On another occasion, when Maryland’s Jim Crow laws prevented African diplomats from eating in white-only diners as they drove from New York to Washington, Kennedy gibed, “Tell them to fly.” http://www.newsweek.com/ferguson-and-garner-cases-hurt-us-foreign-policy-289613

2 comments:

Michele Kearney said...


The article appearing in Newsweek clearly underlines the shatteringly skewed American understanding of the true and compelling meaning of hypocrisy. The author suggests that the recent events involving blacks and white policemen have displayed to the world the extent of our duplicity, costing us in terms of prestige, dignity, honesty and like that.

It appears the the author is unable to see, or perhaps unwilling to illustrate his article and support his thesis by writing about our ringing public condemnations of Assad's Syrians existing in refugee camps for more than two years. In Syria, there are other refugee camps, occupied for over 40 years by Palestinians, similarly in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, which house numbers of Palestinians that exceeds Syrians by many multiples. That situation does not provoke indignation on our part, or even an occasional reference to the problem.

If you wish to call attention to the worrisome impact of America's widespread practice of dynamic hypocrisy, which is harmful and costly, there is no better way to demonstrate that critically important point than by references to our total silence on those camps. The domestic racial problems are totally unacceptable, and merit prompt efforts to correct and eliminate them, but in terms of our international standing, the Middle East is infinitely more important.

Michele Kearney said...

The foregoing comment provided by
Ed Peck