BY COLIN TAYLOR
POLITICS | PUBLISHED ON JUNE 17, 2017
On Friday, President Trump took the unnecessary and counterproductive step of rolling back President Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with the Republic of Cuba.
As yet another part of his petulant crusade to destroy the legacy of our nation’s first black president, Trump put on a stunning show of hypocrisy as he signed an executive order imposing new restrictions on trade and travel to our island neighbor.
Turning on the opportunistic concern for human rights that he shows whenever it suits him, Trump complained loudly about the oppression of Cuba’s regime and babbled about terrorism, the catch-all justification for anything in the Trump administration these days.
“The Castro regime has shipped arms to North Korea and fueled chaos in Venezuela. While imprisoning innocents, it has harbored cop killers, hijackers and terrorists. It has supported human trafficking, forced labor and exploitation all around the globe.”
The hypocrisy is incredible. Under President Trump, civilian casualties in the war against ISIS have skyrocketed. 3,800 innocent people have died from American bombs since Trump took office, as a newly empowered military uses bigger and bigger bombs on civilian areas.
On top of that, in the past few months, President Trump has publicly praised Rodrigo Duterte of the Phillippines, whose death squads have slaughtered thousands of people in the past few months; Erdogan Recep Tayyip of Turkey, who holds tens of thousands of political prisoners and subjects them to torture and rape in his prisons and is waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds in the southeast, and King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is orchestrating a blockade of Yemen that is leaving millions starving while he slaughters thousands with his American-bought weapons.
So it comes as no surprise that the government of Cuba was quick to point out this ridiculous double standard, stating that the United States is in “no condition to lecture” them about human rights in a lengthy statement:
“We have deep concerns by the respect and the guarantees of the human rights in that country, where there is a large number of cases of murder, brutality and police abuse, particularly against the African Americans; the right to live is violated as a result of deaths by firearms.”
CNN reports that the government of Raul Castro went on to criticize Trump for a whole host of other human rights violations, including “salary inequality between genders, the marginalization of immigrants and refugees from Islamic and other countries, Trump’s proposed wall on the southern border, his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord, the imprisonment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, the killing of US and foreign citizens in drone attacks, the preface for and conduct of the wars in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, and estimates that the Republican health care bill would cause 23 million people to lose medical insurance.”
President Trump has disgraced our nation before the world far too many times to be able to claim any moral high ground; his continued insistence on doing so simply exposes himself for what he really is – an ideologically vacant opportunist with no concern for anything but himself and his personal interests.
Source
http://washingtonjournal.com/2017/06/17/trump-just-broke-off-relations-cuba-cubas-response-perfect/
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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