Samantha Power Wrote a Pulitzer Prize Book Against Genocide Then Allowed One to Happen
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Samantha Power Wrote a Pulitzer Prize Book Against Genocide Then Allowed One to Happen
Samantha Power built her career on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book condemning the world's inaction during the Rwanda genocide. She argued that the United States has a moral obligation to intervene with force when genocide occurs. Power rose to become chair of the Atrocity Prevention Board under Obama and later served on Biden's National Security Council as head of USAID. But when Israeli officials openly called Palestinians "Amalekites" and "subhuman" while announcing plans to destroy Gaza's population, Power remained silent. Israeli leaders invoked biblical commands to eliminate an entire people, defense ministers declared war on "human animals," and officials proposed burying civilians alive with bulldozers. Power, the woman who scolded the world for allowing the Rwanda genocide, said nothing. When confronted about her silence during an actual genocide happening on her watch, she refused to answer. The hypocrisy is staggering.
In April 1994, one of the worst atrocities of the modern era erupted in the landlocked central African country of Rwanda. The dominant Hutu tribe, which controlled the government, led the majority of the population in an attempt to exterminate the minority Tutsi tribe. For 100 days, they killed hundreds of thousands of people, more than half a million, many with machetes or burned alive or buried alive. They raped even more than that. In acts of unspeakable cruelty, they corralled AIDS patients from hospitals and sent them out to rape Tutsi women and infect them with HIV.
As the details of what is now referred to as the Rwanda genocide filtered out to the rest of the world, people were stunned and nauseated by it. Many were bewildered that something like this could happen not long after the most famous genocide in history during the 1940s in Europe, when everyone had said, "That could never happen again." But it did. A version of it happened in Rwanda in 1994.
What was even more distressing and shocking was that the world knew it was happening as it happened and did nothing to stop it. In most cases, governments said nothing about it even when it was in progress. From the very beginning, four days after the genocide in Rwanda started, a Swiss journalist in Kigali, the capital, published a piece in a French newspaper saying, "I have interviewed eight officials and there's a genocide going on in Rwanda." This ran in a Western paper and was picked up in other Western papers, but no one did anything.
The Red Cross knew it was happening. The UN knew it was happening, and there were UN troops in Rwanda. The French government knew it was happening, and there were French troops there. The nation of Israel knew it was happening. Israel had been a supporter of the Hutu government for decades. In fact, it seems obvious that some of the bullets and grenades used to murder Tutsis were sold to the Hutu government by the Israelis. There is evidence that the Israeli government sold weapons to the Hutu government during the genocide which were used to murder Tutsis. The documents surrounding this have been classified and are under seal per orders of an Israeli court on the grounds that were they to become public, it would be bad for Israel's image globally.
The Clinton administration famously knew it was happening but for domestic political reasons didn't act to stop it. The lesson is something horrible, in fact genocide, can happen. The world can know it's happening and allow it to happen.
Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book
That lesson is what a young Harvard Law student called Samantha Power thought about a lot as she was getting her degree in Cambridge. How can a genocide take place within living memory of the Second World War and the civilized world does nothing about it?
In 2002, she published a book on that exact question. The book was called "A Problem from Hell." It won the Pulitzer Prize and all kinds of other prizes. Samantha Power's case was simple: the world cannot allow genocide to happen again. If people find out this is happening, they have to act. That's the mark of civilization. You stop mass murder of civilians on ethnic grounds, genocide. If you don't, then you're not civilized.
The United States, she wrote, has a moral obligation to intervene with force if it determines that a genocide is underway. What's the point of having the world's largest military if you can't at least try to prevent a genocide?
She was lauded for this. The book changed her life. She became one of the most famous people in the world and in a fairly short period of time a close adviser to then-candidate Barack Obama. He was elected in 2008 and promptly made her the chairman of the Atrocity Prevention Board. You may not have known such a thing existed, but it does. It's an inter-agency group that still exists under a slightly different name, but its purpose is in the name: preventing atrocities using the power of the US government to prevent atrocities.
Power's Return to Government Under Biden
There weren't many well-publicized genocides during the first Obama term, but Samantha Power stuck around. She ended up teaching at Harvard Law School. Then Biden became president in 2020 and she went back into the White House. At this point, she was the head of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. She also had a seat on the National Security Council. She was a high-level foreign policy person in the Biden administration.
It just so happens that during her time there, the thing that she warned about and wrote about actually happened: another genocide.
The Gaza Operation and Israeli Officials' Statements
This genocide took place in Gaza, the territory that Israel has controlled since 1967, formerly part of Egypt. Shortly after the attacks by Hamas into southern Israel in October of 2023, Israel decided to murder as many people as it possibly could in Gaza with the aim of getting the entire population to leave Gaza so Israel could take over Gaza. This is not speculation because Israeli officials said out loud, "This is our plan." And then they tried to do it.
Samantha Power, famous for opposing genocide, said not a word about this. By this point, 30 years after the Rwanda genocide, Samantha Power's view of genocide appeared to have changed. The way to fight genocide really was to empower women and girls in the LGBT community and fight the patriarchy. That's how you prevent genocide. But when an actual genocide occurred on her watch as someone with a seat on the National Security Council, Samantha Power did and said nothing.
She is now back at Harvard Law School, but she has been asked about this. "You're the genocide lady, but you did nothing to stop genocide after writing a book scolding the rest of us for doing nothing to stop genocide. Why is that?" She didn't respond with an explanation. She said she wasn't there to answer questions like that. It's an amazing exchange. What she did not say was, "You're absolutely right. I wrote a book saying the civilized world can't allow genocide to happen and then I allowed it to happen." But that's exactly what she did.
The World Knew From the Beginning
What's even more interesting is that she's not alone in this. Everybody knew from the first week after October 7th that Israel planned to commit genocide, traditionally defined genocide: targeting a population because of their bloodline and trying to exterminate or move them. Everyone knew this because Israel announced it twice in October of 2023.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said out loud in a public speech, "The Palestinians are Amalek." Amalek is a reference that many in the West didn't get, but everyone in the region understood. It's a reference to 1 Samuel 15, the first verses in it, which describe God's command to eliminate a tribe called the Amalekites. Not just the draft-age men, but all of them, including children and infants. All of them. Kill all of them. Destroy all of their property. Slay all of their animals. This is God's command.
When Benjamin Netanyahu describes the Palestinians as Amalek twice in the first month of the Gaza operation, you don't need to guess what the point of this is. The point is to destroy every man, woman, child, and infant in Gaza. And they set about doing that.
A Catalog of Genocidal Statements
It wasn't just Netanyahu who said that. It was a lot of different authorities in Israel. On October 9th, three days after the Hamas attacks, the Defense Minister of Israel described his plans for Gaza, not for Hamas, but for the entire territory, for the over 2 million people who live there. He said: "No electricity, no food will be allowed in. We are fighting human animals, not human beings, human animals."
The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem responded not to say, "Whoa, settle down, Defense Minister. Calling your opponents animals is genocidal talk." No. The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem thought he didn't go far enough. He said: "They're not human animals. They're not human beings. They are subhuman." And then he said that the Palestinians of Gaza should be buried alive with bulldozers, which some ultimately apparently were.
Cabinet ministers in Israel and supporters of Israel in the United States made the same case in public from the very first day: kill indiscriminately, move them out.
