The Ambassador of Blame America First We’ve come a long way from Pat Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ambassador-of-blame-america-first-11618527312?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
he U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is supposed to speak for American values and interests. But judging by her recent remarks, new Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield is going to speak mainly about the faults of her own country.
President Biden’s Ambassador spoke Wednesday to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and her recitation of America’s sins could have come from China’s Global Times. She said one of her priorities will be addressing racial injustice and spoke of her own experience with discrimination.
Fair enough, but then she kept going: “I shared these stories and others to acknowledge, on the international stage, that I have personally experienced one of America’s greatest imperfections. I have seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.”
How about American progress on race since the founding, such as the Civil War that ended slavery or the civil-rights movement? Ms. Thomas-Greenfield has other ideas.
“Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today’s world, that is every society,” she added. “In America, that takes many forms. It’s the white supremacy that led to the senseless killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other Black Americans. It’s the spike in hate crimes over the past three years—against Latino Americans, Sikh and Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, and immigrants. And it’s the bullying, discrimination, brutality, and violence that Asian Americans face everyday, especially since the outbreak of Covid-19.”
Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield managed to work in a passing reference to Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya and China’s “genocide” of the Uighurs. But she put the Biden Administration’s decision to rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council—with members like Cuba, China, Russia, Venezuela—largely in the context of the moral equivalence of the U.S. and those offenders.
We can only imagine what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, a pair of Democrats who were ambassadors to the U.N. in the 1970s and 1980s, would think of this. They made a contribution by speaking up for human rights in the Soviet Union and other countries where rights were trampled as a matter of official policy. Ms. Thomas-Greenfield seems to believe her job is to bring critical race theory to the world, with a special focus on criticizing her own country.
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