The dismantling of a malevolent empire
In the past couple of weeks, devastating information has erupted into the public domain detailing the malign activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Trump administration has effectively shut USAID down by freezing its existing foreign assistance programs, worth around $70 billion per year, and putting the agency under the oversight of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting director.
The freeze, says the White House, is designed to root out wasteful spending on “pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats” at the agency, such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) transgender and tourism programs.
This has triggered claims that vital humanitarian work has been brought to an abrupt halt, threatening the lives and health of millions of people all over the world. In fact, emergency food aid and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” are reportedly being allowed to continue.
Far more alarming information has now surfaced suggesting that USAID has been a major contributor to extremist and subversive activity. The Washington Free Beacon reports current and former U.S. officials who worked closely with the aid group saying they watched for years as it funneled millions of dollars to bodies engaged in anti-Israel advocacy and that were linked to terrorism.
At the start of this month, the Middle East Forum reported that USAID had awarded “millions of federal dollars” to “organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas.” In one Biden administration-era case, the agency funded an “educational and community center in Gaza” controlled by a local group called the Unlimited Friends Association.
The MEF wrote that this group is a Hamas proxy that works to reward the “families of martyrs” in Gaza with cash handouts and “promotes violently antisemitic rhetoric across its social media pages.”
Another report published last month by NGO Monitor outlined millions in USAID funding for two nonprofits—Mercy Corps and American Near East Refugee Aid—that “have closely coordinated with a Gaza-based ministry, run by a senior Hamas official identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as previously responsible for part of Hamas’s smuggling operation.”
USAID’s funding of extremist groups, according to the Free Beacon, caused internal friction across multiple U.S. administrations. In some cases, the agency fought to conceal how public money was being spent. Agency officials also fought pro-Israel policymaking at the U.S. State Department, urging officials to pare down statements that praised the Jewish state.
During the war in Gaza following the atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, the agency displayed vicious prejudice against Israel. It accused that embattled country of deliberately blocking aid deliveries, ignoring the fact that Hamas was stealing these for its own use and for black-market sales that funded its terror activities, and even urged the administration to end Israel’s military aid.
In the furor that has erupted over USAID, relatively little attention has been paid to the official who runs it.
Samantha Power, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden to run the aid agency in 2021, was a former close adviser to former President Barack Obama.
In 2003, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book about America’s foreign-policy response to genocide. In 2002, she was asked as a “thought experiment” what she would advise the U.S. president to do about the Israel-Palestinian conflict “if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide.”
She responded to this already disturbingly loaded question by saying that there needed to be a willingness to “put something on the line” to help the situation. This might mean, she said, “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import”—by which she meant American Jews—and investing billions of dollars “not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine.”
By this, she meant supporting “a mammoth protection force” that would need to be “a meaningful military presence.”
Clearly, Power was not talking about invading Gaza or the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria to prevent the Palestinian Arabs from committing genocide against Israel. She was talking instead about invading these areas to prevent a genocide or major human-rights abuses by Israel against the Palestinian Arabs.
This, of course, is the very same libel that has been hurled at Israel during its overwhelmingly just war of defense against genocide since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people and the taking of 251 hostages back into Gaza.
Power was also suggesting that defending Israel was not a cause that should be dear to Americans and decent people everywhere, nor that the great majority of Americans do indeed thus support Israel. Instead, she suggested that the only people who might be alienated by invading Israel would be American Jews who, to her eyes, exercised tremendous political and financial power over American politics.
Subsequently, she said of these comments that she couldn’t remember what she had said and didn’t understand what she had meant.
Maybe a clue lies in what she told the New Statesman about attitudes towards Obama during his first presidential campaign: “So much of it is about: ‘Is he going to be good for the Jews?’” Or when she bemoaned the tendency of U.S. policymakers “to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics.”
In other words, Power—who was born and spent her early years in Ireland—has got a major problem not just with the State of Israel but with the Jews themselves. It is therefore hardly a surprise that she and her agency have played a major role in contributing to the diabolical onslaught against both Israel and the Jews that has consumed the West since the Oct. 7 atrocities.
A devotee of the human-rights culture that is the unchallengeable orthodoxy in Western progressive circles, Power is the living embodiment of the way in which “human rights” have been turned into the anvil upon which justice and conscience are being smashed.
USAID is but one outpost of the international humanitarian and “human rights” establishment that has been totally captured by the anti-Israel, anti-West, anti-civilization liberal progressive classes.
This whole network—the International Criminal Court; the International Court of Justice; the army of human rights “lawfare” lawyers; the United Nations and its many agencies; the big NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch—all of this is geared to defame, demonize and delegitimize Israel while sanitizing and supporting those bent upon destroying it.
U.S. President Donald Trump has recognized how these institutions have become corrupted. Accordingly, in his first weeks in office he has taken a blowtorch to them.
He has pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council; he has extended the funding ban for the U.N. Refugee and Welfare Agency, which has been revealed to be indistinguishable from Hamas; he has begun the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization; he has called for a review of American involvement in the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and he has launched a review of American funding for the United Nations in light of “the wild disparities in levels of funding among different countries.”
The liberal progressive world is aghast and appalled by all this; but sane and sensible people should be cheering. The universalist human-rights culture and “humanitarian” establishment have made a mockery of the elevated causes of justice, compassion and relief of the oppressed for which they purport to stand but which they have turned into their polar opposites.
Promoting instead lies, hatred and even terrorism, they have knocked the West off its moral compass and are in large measure responsible for the murderous insanity that has consumed the so-called civilized world ever since the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Only when this malevolent establishment has been toppled from its cultural pinnacle will Western society have any chance of emerging from the political and philosophical cesspool into which it has fallen.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/403919
