Trump just killed an 8-year-old girl; the silence is telling
December 2, 2015: Donald Trump says you have to “take out” the families of terrorists.
January 29, 2017: 8-year-old Nora al-Awlaki, daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, is killed in the first JSOC mission approved by President Trump.
On Sunday, Donald Trump launched his first JSOC operation in Southern Yemen, calling it a success. The military first claimed that no civilians were killed in the raid. As with most civilian casualty reports from the military, this was a lie.
Reuters soon reported that 10 women and children were killed in the raid. The next day a senior U.S. military official told NBC that “almost everything went wrong.” Local Yemenis described it as a massacre of women and children and think that as many as 57 people may have been killed.
After 15 years of stories just like this, I don’t expect most people to be up in arms over yet another instance of American troops raiding and killing locals in search of terrorists.
But here’s the part that I can’t get my head around:
Just over a year after saying “you have to take out” the families of terrorists, Donald Trump killed Nora al-Awlaki, an 8-year-old American girl, in his firstJSOC operation. Nora was the daughter of the late radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman were killed in separate drone strikes by Barack Obama in 2011.
Nora was shot in the neck. According to her grandfather, she bled for more than two hours without medical assistance before she died.
Where is the outrage?
Why are the millions of people who took part in the Women’s March around the world silent about the brutal murder of Nora al-Awlaki? Why didn’t they speak out when Barack Obama killed her brother Abdulrahman?
Why has “the Resistance” ignored the innocent Yemenis murdered by the “heroes” of Seal Team 6? Where were all these people for the last eight years as Barack Obama deported close to 3 million people, fought perpetual war, and allied the United States with the world’s worst regimes?
Why has the mainstream media, which has opposed Donald Trump like no president before, left this story to the back pages or for independent news sources to report? Why didn’t the New York Times make the top story of yesterday’s paper “You Have To Take Out Their Families” with a photo of Nora al-Awlaki?
The truth is most liberals stopped caring about the United States killing innocent people around the world a long time ago, and a dramatic turnabout today would only highlight the extremes of their hypocrisy. Liberals cannot condemn the murder of Nora al-Awlaki without also acknowledging that Barack Obama murdered her brother. Doing so would require genuine soul searching and recognition of who and what they’ve stood for the past eight years.
“The Resistance” contemptuously ignored the atrocities of Barack Obama’s presidency and thus far seems more than content to do the same for Donald Trump. The moral high ground they claim is eroded by the body count they’ve watched pile up in the Middle East. Today their screams about women’s rights and free immigration only further drown out the cries of people like Nora al-Awlaki, the innocent victims of America’s wars, which will rage on in their silence.
