 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Political hypocrisy refers to any discrepancy between what a political party claims and the practices the party is trying to hide. [1] Modern political debate is often characterized by accusations and counter-accusations of hypocrisy. [1]
The notion of hypocrisy has its origins in the theater. The Greek word (hypokrisis) meant 'acting' and the first 'hypocrites' were classical theater actors. As a result, the phrase was first used to describe the theatrical function of appearing to be someone else. [2] As an attempt to separate one's personal behavior from the standards that apply to everyone else, [3] hypocrisy in its pejorative connotation always implies some form of deception. [2] American political journalist Michael Gerson says that political hypocrisy is "the conscious use of a mask to fool the public and gain political benefit". [4]
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was an outspoken opponent of political hypocrisy, though he considered it inevitable. David Runciman writes that "Hobbes was at pains not to set the bar for sincerity too high, which would let in the most corrosive forms of hypocrisy through the back door. But he also believed that some forms of hypocrisy, unchecked, would render political life impossible". [5] [1] The author Bernard Mandeville goes further, distinguishing two types of hypocrisy: one in which politicians wear a mask of hypocrisy to protect public interests, and the other more sinister hypocrisy to serve the interests of malicious politicians. The distinction between the two, as Mandeville seeks to demonstrate, is difficult to maintain in any political setting. [1] The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau devoted much of his writing to creating portraits of innocence, virtue, and integrity as counterpoints to his scathing critique of the corruption, flattery, and hypocrisy that afflicted the social and political life in his view. For the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the mask of hypocrisy is intended to conceal or deceive and must always be removed. [1] Similarly, in his book On Compromise (dubbed "The Prince for Victorian liberalism" by his biographer), the British politician John Morley expresses his concerns about the triumph of the political spirit, which he defines as the abandonment of principles and the willingness of politicians of all stripes to dissimulate and compromise in the name of the party. [6] [1] In contrast, the English philosopher Francis Bacon, believed that wisdom is striking the correct balance between honesty and deception, so that one's reputation for honesty and their ability to deceive are both preserved. [7] [1]
In democratic politics, according to Dhruba Ghosh, the need for hypocrisy arises from the structure of political interactions. [8] David Runciman suggests that hypocrisy is common in politics and particularly unavoidable in liberal democratic democracies: "No one likes it, but everyone is at it." [9] In her book Ordinary Vices (1984), Judith Shklar downplays hypocrisy, ranking it as an unimportant vice based on its damage to liberal communities in comparison with, for instance, cruelty. [10] Nevertheless, because hypocrisy is despised and commonplace, Shklar writes that democratic politicians are often tempted to reveal their opponents' double standards: it is easier to dispose of an opponent's character by exposing his hypocrisy than to challenge his political convictions. [11] Shklar believes that we should be more accepting of hypocrisy and realize that liberal democratic politics can only be sustained with a certain amount of deception and pretense. [12]
The disparity in the treatment of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in Europe has been considered an instance of political hypocrisy. [13] [14]
John Mearsheimer suggests that the U.S. foreign policy rhetorics of high liberal ideas does not match its actions. Such a chasm, according to Eugenio Lilli, has fueled accusations of U.S. hypocrisy and harmed the U.S. image in Muslim communities, providing fertile ground for extremist organizations to recruit people willing to carry out terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens and assets. [15] In particular, the constant support for Israel is said to have harmed the U.S. image in the Greater Middle East. [16] Condemning Russian invasion of Ukraine while giving Israel a blank check to wipe out Palestine simply doesn't compute; said Michael N. Barnett, a professor of international relations at George Washington University. [17] As another example, the U.S. official policy of promoting democratic values contradicts the U.S. warm relations with monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East. [18] While claiming to be a proponent of the human rights, the U.S. has also turned a blind eye to alleged violations of human rights in countries like South Korea, the Philippines, and Iran's Pahlavi dynasty, which consistently abused human rights. [19] In another instance, the charges against Iran for its nuclear programme have not been met with any U.S. criticism of Israel which possesses more than two-hundred nuclear warheads. [20] According to Sarah Leah Whitson, the US is generally supportive of the International Criminal Court when it prosecutes its enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, but is critical of the court when it prosecutes its allies, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [21]
The U.S. has been accused of scant ratification of human rights treaties despite its official policy of promoting human rights worldwide. [22] In one case, the U.S. has been criticized for refusing to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the American opposition to this convention is said to be primarily shaped by political and religious conservatives., [23] The U.S. has publicly stated that it is opposed to torture, but has been criticized for condoning it in the School of the Americas. The U.S. has advocated a respect for national sovereignty but has supported internal guerrilla movements and paramilitary organizations, such as the Contras in Nicaragua. [24] [25] The U.S. has also been accused of denouncing alleged rights violations in China while overlooking alleged human rights abuses by Israel. [26] The Defense Technical Information Center reports that the U.S. did not pursue its human rights policy in South Korea, the Philippines, and Iran's Pahlavi dynasty, for strategic reasons, exposing the hypocrisy of "human rights diplomacy." [27] According to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, trust is the fundamental problem of the U.S. in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. Arabs and the rest of the Muslim world, according to this report, have simply spent too much time listening to U.S. rhetoric and then watching the U.S. continually fail to deliver on it. [28] A number of authors have attacked the U.S. attitude towards human rights: Ahmed an-Naim sees the U.S. monitoring of the international human rights as a pretext for its coercive humanitarian intervention in pursuit of its own foreign policy goals. [29] Francis Boyle writes that genocide is perceived legal today when carried out at the request of the U.S. and its allies, such as Israel. [30] According to Boyle, the U.S. government promoted the man responsible for blowing up an Iranian civilian airliner but wrongly sanctioned Libya when a U.S. airliner was attacked. [31] When former US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, took office, his department outlined general guidelines to be followed “We should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” read the leaked memo, sent to Tillerson to guide his policy actions, suggesting that human rights is a tool that can only be used against enemies, not friends. [32]
The U.S. foreign policy language extols its worldwide support for the cause of democracy, though Eugenio Lilli suggests that this rhetoric does not match the conduct of U.S., particularly in the Greater Middle East. [15] In an article called Astounding Hypocrisy, Arab News writes that Palestinians voted for Hamas in defiance of Israel but the administration of George W. Bush made it clear that the U.S. would not accept the outcome of the free election. In the same speech, however, Bush expressed his hopes for a democratic Iran and a pro-American government there. [33] During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Muslim communities largely believed that promoting democracy was used as a pretext by the Bush administration to justify the invasion. [15] Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the search for restricted weapons, the United States claimed, was the first priority for the country; though Bush later openly proclaimed regime change as the objective. The invasion was codenamed "the battle for Iraqi freedom," and American propagandists, according to Mack H Jones, flooded their messaging with homilies about the U.S. desire and intention to liberate the Iraqi people and offer them western-style democracy. The Bush administration's ostensible desire to provide democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people, while continuing to align itself with several repressive nondemocratic regimes around the world including some Middle Eastern client states, is yet another example of American duplicity, according to Jones. [34]
Concerning April 2024 Israel–Hamas war protests on university campuses in the United States, Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago told Al Jazeera that "The reality is the Democrats have been telling us that young people need to save democracy ...But where's the democracy when you have state troopers beating up students and faculty for protesting, and the White House saying nothing about that?" [35]
Biden has acknowledged that Netanyahu is not doing enough to finalize a peace agreement, but his administration has done nothing to pressure the Israel to do so. Instead, the US continue to support Israel in the war. According to James Zogby, the Biden administration has been a “passive enabler” of Netanyahu, who wants to prevent a ceasefire deal to please his far-right government coalition partners and ensure his own political survival. Osamah Khalil, a professor of history at Syracuse University, also questioned the sincerity of the diplomatic efforts of the Democratic administration and said that these efforts were for domestic political consumption on the eve of the US elections. “All this was negotiations for the sake of negotiations, particularly as the war became increasingly unpopular,” said Khalil. [36]
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a pro-Israel lobbying group that advocates its policies to the legislative and executive branches of the United States. One of several pro-Israel lobbying organizations in the country, it has been called one of its most powerful lobbying groups.
Neoconservatism is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international relations together with a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength". They are known for espousing opposition to communism and radical politics.
Elliott Abrams is an American politician and lawyer, who has served in foreign policy positions for presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Abrams is considered to be a neoconservative. He was a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 to 2021 and as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021.
Adnan al-Pachachi or Adnan Muzahim Ameen al-Pachachi was a veteran Iraqi and Emirati politician and diplomat. Pachachi was Iraq's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1959 to 1965 and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iraq from 1965 to 1967, during the Six-Day War with Israel; he again served as Permanent Representative to the UN from 1967 to 1969. After 1971, he left Iraq in exile and became an Emirati Minister of State and political advisor to United Arab Emirates president Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Pachachi was an important figure in Iraqi politics, often described as Iraq's elder statesman. He rejected the role of president in the Iraqi Interim Government.
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance is a book about the United States and its foreign policy written by American political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky. It was first published in the United States in November 2003 by Metropolitan Books and then in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books. It was republished by Haymarket Books in January 2024.
Joshua Muravchik is a neoconservative political scholar. He resides in Washington, DC based World Affairs Institute, he is also an adjunct professor at the DC based Institute of World Politics and a former fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was formerly a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute (2012–2013), a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (1987–2008), and a scholar in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1985).
Rend al-Rahim Francke is an Iraqi political activist who often appears on various current affairs programs. She held the position as Iraqi ambassador to the United States. She is considered to be a secularist trying to enable Iraq to transition to a liberal democratic model.
The main event by far shaping the United States foreign policy during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009) was the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror. There was massive domestic and international support for destroying the attackers. With UN approval, US and NATO forces quickly invaded the attackers' base in Afghanistan and drove them out and the Taliban government that harbored them. It was the start of a 20-year quagmire that finally ended in failure with the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan.
The state of Democracy in Middle East and North Africa can be comparatively assessed according to various definitions of democracy. De jure democracies in the Middle East and North Africa are according to system of government:
Francis Anthony Boyle is an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He has served as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported the rights of Palestinians and indigenous peoples. Boyle was one of the architects behind the formulation of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam and author of The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka. He is a long time conspiracy theorist about bioengineered viruses and in Jan 2020 declared COVID was "a genetically engineered bioweapon."
Stephen Zunes is an American international relations scholar specializing in the Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy, and strategic nonviolent action. He is known internationally as a leading critic of United States policy in the Middle East, particularly under the George W. Bush administration, and an analyst of nonviolent civil insurrections against autocratic regimes.
United States foreign policy in the Middle East has its roots in the early 19th-century Tripolitan War that occurred shortly after the 1776 establishment of the United States as an independent sovereign state, but became much more expansive in the aftermath of World War II. With the goal of preventing the Soviet Union from gaining influence in the region during the Cold War, American foreign policy saw the deliverance of extensive support in various forms to anti-communist and anti-Soviet regimes; among the top priorities for the U.S. with regards to this goal was its support for the State of Israel against its Soviet-backed neighbouring Arab countries during the peak of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The U.S. also came to replace the United Kingdom as the main security patron for Saudi Arabia as well as the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf in the 1960s and 1970s in order to ensure, among other goals, a stable flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. As of 2023, the U.S. has diplomatic relations with every country in the Middle East except for Iran, with whom relations were severed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Syria, with whom relations were suspended in 2012 following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.
Criticism of United States foreign policy encompasses a wide range of opinions and views on the perceived failures and shortcomings of American foreign policy and actions. Some Americans view the country as qualitatively different from other nations and believe it cannot be judged by the same standards as other countries; this belief is sometimes termed American exceptionalism. This belief was particularly prevalent in the 20th century. This belief became less dominant in the 21st century as the country has become more divided politically and has made highly controversial foreign policy decisions such as the Iraq War. Nevertheless, the United States is an extremely powerful country and is still generally considered a world superpower from an economic, military, and political point-of-view, and it has sometimes disregarded international norms, rules, and laws in its foreign policy.
The article describes the state of race relations and racism in the Middle East. Racism is widely condemned throughout the world, with 174 states parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by April 8, 2011. In different countries, the forms that racism takes may be different for historic, cultural, religious, economic or demographic reasons.
Jordan has been a very close ally of the United States for decades, dating back to the establishment of bilateral relations between the two countries in 1949. The country was named a major non-NATO ally of the U.S. in 1996.
The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) is a United States State Department program that fosters meaningful and effective partnerships between citizens, civil society, the private sector, and governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to resolve local challenges and promote shared interests in the areas of participatory governance and economic opportunity and reform.
Condoleezza Rice served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, under President George W. Bush, from 2005 to 2009, overseeing the department that conducted the foreign policy of George W. Bush. She was preceded in office by Colin Powell, and succeeded by Hillary Clinton. As secretary of state she traveled widely and initiated many diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Bush administration.
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) was a socialist, New York City-based organization that promoted "a new, progressive and non-militaristic U.S. foreign policy," in contrast to existing foreign policy, which CPD characterized as "based on domination, militarism, fear of popular struggles, enforcement of an inequitable and cruel global economy and persistent support for authoritarian regimes." The hallmark of CPD's work was its efforts to seek out and work with dissidents and social justice movements worldwide, and to forge alliances between them and progressive movements in the United States. The organization had more than 100 endorsers, including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Daniel Ellsberg and Joanne Landy in 2017, CPD ceased to function.
Democracy promotion by the United States aims to encourage governmental and non-governmental actors to pursue political reforms that will lead ultimately to democratic governance.
Phyllis Bennis is an American Jewish writer, activist, and political commentator. Focusing mainly on issues related to the Middle East and the United Nations, she is a strong critic of Israel and the United States and a leading advocate of Palestinian rights.
