Blinken's Willful Blindness on the Gaza Genocide

Blinken can deny a genocide that he is abetting and move on because he assumes that there is no accountability for what he says and does.

Peter Beinart comments on Antony Blinken’s willful blindness about the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. role in it:

And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.

None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power.

Blinken can deny a genocide that he is abetting and move on because he assumes that there is no accountability for what he says and does. He ignores the mountain of evidence contained in the reports because he must have already decided before the reports were published that it can’t be a genocide. Perhaps he believes that genocide is something that only our enemies and other pariahs do. Unfortunately, Blinken has a lot of company on that score. Most people in Washington cling most fiercely to the myth that the U.S. and its partners are simply a force for good in the world, and they won’t acknowledge or accept anything that complicates or contradicts that belief. The mental prison that Beinart describes is that of exceptionalism.