THE LEFT TRIED TO REWRITE HISTORY IN THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM RE OBAMA’S ROLE IN SYRIA
Whitewash Interrupted
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: And the report was anything but disinterested. The museum’s memorial council includes at least five former Obama National Security Council staffers, among them Ben Rhodes, arguably more responsible for the administration’s Syria policy than anyone except the man he worked for.
The truth is Obama did not merely do nothing while Assad put the people of his country through a meat grinder and gassed children. He stepped aside out of respect for what he called Iran’s “equities” in Syria. Assad was Tehran’s man, and Obama didn’t want to interfere lest his coveted deal with Iran’s leaders come undone. Worse, as part of that deal, he approved filling the Iranian regime’s war chest with billions of dollars in sanctions relief and repatriated funds that had been frozen in the United States ever since Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution. It’s no exaggeration to say that the misbegotten Iran deal helped fund Assad’s murderous campaign.
Whitewashing Obama’s role and their own in a genocide, his aides sought to etch their perverse draft of history in stone—in the stone halls of a museum whose stated mission is to inspire “citizens and leaders to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.”
Last week the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., removed from its website a study absolving the Obama administration of any blame for its inaction in the face of the Syrian genocide. The study had been scheduled for release amid much hoopla at a September 11 event hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The multi-author report was based on computational modeling, game theory, and interviews with a number of Syria experts and former policymakers. The conclusion? There was nothing President Barack Obama could have done to stop the dictator Bashar al-Assad, along with his patrons Iran and Russia, from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Indeed, the study contended, had Obama intervened, he might have made the greatest humanitarian disaster of the still-young 21st century even worse.
Tablet magazine’s Armin Rosen interviewed many of the museum’s board members as well as Jewish community leaders and intellectuals to gauge their feelings about this attempt to launder Obama’s reputation via the good offices of the Holocaust museum.
Writer Leon Wieseltier called it “an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism” and added: “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational-modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of John J. McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944, I’m sure we could concoct the f—ing algorithms for that, too.”
Meanwhile, a number of Middle East experts and journalists chastised the museum’s decision to pull the paper. New Yorkmagazine argued that the public deserves the right to consider the findings in the report. But of course the argument has not been suppressed. The notion that there’s nothing Obama could have done to stop Assad’s killing machine has been the official line of the Obama administration and its media echo chamber ever since the Syrian despot first fired on unarmed protesters six-and-a-half years ago.
And the report was anything but disinterested. The museum’s memorial council includes at least five former Obama National Security Council staffers, among them Ben Rhodes, arguably more responsible for the administration’s Syria policy than anyone except the man he worked for.
The truth is Obama did not merely do nothing while Assad put the people of his country through a meat grinder and gassed children. He stepped aside out of respect for what he called Iran’s “equities” in Syria. Assad was Tehran’s man, and Obama didn’t want to interfere lest his coveted deal with Iran’s leaders come undone. Worse, as part of that deal, he approved filling the Iranian regime’s war chest with billions of dollars in sanctions relief and repatriated funds that had been frozen in the United States ever since Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution. It’s no exaggeration to say that the misbegotten Iran deal helped fund Assad’s murderous campaign.
Whitewashing Obama’s role and their own in a genocide, his aides sought to etch their perverse draft of history in stone—in the stone halls of a museum whose stated mission is to inspire “citizens and leaders to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.”
