One by one, the emails from the White House arrived in inboxes across Washington on the morning of April 23, each highlighting a unique initiative regarding a different corner of the globe: Syria. Iran. Uganda.
The unifying factor was the president’s appearance that day at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and together the seemingly disparate issues underscored a message carefully calibrated by top White House officials: The Holocaust was uniquely a crime against the Jews, and its lessons for today are realized both in protecting Israel and preventing atrocities from being inflicted on any other people.
Obama threaded the themes together in his speech at the museum following a tour guided by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust memoirist and Nobel laureate.
“When efforts are made to equate Zionism to racism, we reject them,” Obama said. “When international fora single out Israel with unfair resolutions, we vote against them. When attempts are made to delegitimize the State of Israel, we oppose them. When faced with a regime that threatens global security and denies the Holocaust and threatens to destroy Israel, the United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
Obama then transitioned to the threats facing others.
“ ‘Never again’ is a challenge to societies,” he said. “We’re joined today by communities who’ve made it your mission to prevent mass atrocities in our time.”
The two-part message — protecting Israel, preventing atrocities — was reflected in the makeup of the audience, a mix of leaders of Jewish groups and groups that have advocated for other populations under threat, including Bosnians and the Sudanese.
Obama’s nod to the Holocaust’s uniqueness and how its trauma shaped his sensitivities to other peoples facing atrocities is not new. But in tying the threats facing Israel to the Holocaust, he seemed to be trying to address a perception among some Israeli and Jewish communal leaders that he does not “get” how Israel figures into post-Holocaust Jewish thinking.
Daniel Mariaschin, executive vice president of B’nai B’rith International, said Obama citing the threats facing Jews was a welcome development.
“This is the first speech that connected the dots on the current threats together with Holocaust remembrance,” he said.
Obama’s thinking about the Holocaust has been picked apart by the Jewish community since before his election as president. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum appearance gave him an opportunity to more clearly articulate his views. In his speech, the president said one message of the Holocaust is that the capacity to inflict harm is embedded in everyone, as is the capacity to do good.
That thinking was reflected in one of the directives he issued that same day: recognizing Jan Karski with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for the Polish resistance fighter’s work providing some of the first eyewitness accounts of the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews.
“We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts, because so many others stood silent,” Obama said. “But let us also tell our children about the Righteous Among the Nations.”
Obama’s thinking on genocide prevention has been informed by the work of his adviser Samantha Power, a top National Security Council official who in making the case for intervention to stop modern-day atrocities has noted the West’s failure to do more to protect the Jews and other victims of genocide.
Power, an architect of the Obama administration’s diplomatic and military strategies in helping to topple dictators in the Ivory Coast and Libya, and in aiding the creation this year of South Sudan, was named April 23 by Obama to lead an Atrocities Prevention Board.
The board, Obama said, would oversee efforts in a number of departments to isolate and confront perpetrators of atrocities.
The White House was eager to show that the board’s agenda already was informing administration policy. Executive orders were issued that day banning the sale of information technology to Syria and Iran that could be used to stifle dissent in those countries.
Obama also renewed the mandate of U.S. military advisers counseling Uganda on the pursuit of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rampaging militia led by Joseph Kony that kidnaps children and rapes and murders civilians.
The president has come under fire, however, from those who say he has not made good on campaign pledges to defend human rights. The Republican Jewish Coalition, in a statement after the speech, faulted Obama for not doing enough to bolster Iranian democracy activists in 2009. Conservatives and congressional Republicans say Obama has shown a lack of resolve in failing to provide opponents of the Syrian regime with military support.
In his speech, Obama defended what he said were his successes but said the U.S. has to pick and choose its battles.
Preventing atrocities, he said, “does not mean we intervene militarily every time there is an injustice in the world.”