Obama’s Evil:The Drone Joke
A drone attack has hit North Wazirstan today and adds to the tally of American drone attacks on Pakistan’s sovereignity and her civilian population. Such attacks are not just a war crime against Pakistan, their legality is at issue too, indeed Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions has said on drones that ‘this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions’.
As Pakistanis we also bemoan the duplicitous role of the Pakistani elite attired both in khakis and suits who allow this gross violation of human rights against the civilian population of the land, they too call home. The drone attacks that bedevil Pakistan, kill many innocent people and Obama is only too well aware of this reality, yet Obama’s drone joke shows a criminal and casual disregard for those lives. Do remember these are Pakistani lives he is personally responsible for ending via drone sttacks he authorises, he acknowledges this by way of making a joke with a threat to drone the pop singers the Jonas Brothers who are adored by his daughters. Watch the buffoon below:
By watching the video above, I am left disgusted and for me it shows hpw the mighty have fallen given that the scholarly Obama, a Harvard law graduate has been reduced to a war criminal and a pint-sized shadow of himself. The second observation is a simple question was Obama such an idiot always or has he taken some Bush pills given the jovial and callous way he has made a joke on drones which actually kill people, something that is never a laughing matter.
Furthermore by joking about drones, Obama has undermined his own so-called agenda to reach out to the Muslim world, indeed the American Prospect’s Adam Serwer has summed it well below:
The Obama administration has spent a great deal of time on outreach to Muslims worldwide, and on dialing down the volume and rhetoric of the prior administration in order to defuse al-Qaeda’s narrative of a clash of civilizations between Muslims and non-Muslims. So you have to wonder why in the world the president’s speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about predator drones into the president’s speech during the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, given that an estimated one-third of drone casualties, or between 289 and 378, have been civilians. It evinces a callous disregard for human life that is really inappropriate for a world leader, especially a president who is waging war against an enemy that deliberately targets civilians. It also helps undermine that outreach by making it look insincere. It’s already hard enough to convince Muslims that the U.S. isn’t indifferent to civilian casualties without having the president joke about it.
Serwer, later in his article comments on:
‘the relative lack of outrage has to do with whose lives were the butt of the joke, we recognize the names and faces of the American service members who died because of Bush’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction as friends, relatives, and family members. The people who die in drone strikes are anonymous, they have no faces or names, except for the suspected terrorist targets the administration celebrates as being neutralized’.
The harsh truth is that drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians and that such Pakistani civilians are for Obama and the world at large, humans of a lesser God, such civilians are dispensable for this man of Harvard law now acting as an assassin. Such Pakistan civilians are humans of a lesser ALLAH too I suppose, for the Pakistani power elite in government and in opposition, both in khakis and in suits allow Pakistan as a state, to collude in the killings of its own citizens. Therein lies the great betrayal and great tragedy of Pakistan.
