Democrats embrace celebrity. But Democratic politicians also treat Felicity Huffman, Woody Allen, and O.J. Simpson as pariahs today, the stench of real or alleged crimes too great to bear.
Their ostracism makes the political and celebrity embrace of Hotel Rwanda hotelier Paul Rusesabagina all the more bizarre. Celebrities and members of Congress rallied around Rusesabagina after a Rwandan court last September convicted him of terrorism and sentenced the 67-year-old to 25 years in prison.
Rusesabagina has a small but vocal lobby in the United States. It includes Hollywood personalities who tied their reputation to his story, academics involved in his foundation, most of whom ironically never stepped foot in Rwanda, and activists motivated by animosity toward Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Rusesabagina’s cheerleaders make several arguments for his release. They say Rwanda kidnapped him, but videos in Dubai show him walking freely onto a private jet. His supporters complain a Rwandan priest tricked him into the trip. True, but trickery is legal. Some outside lawyers demand his release on minor procedural questions: the judicial equivalent of tearing down a skyscraper because it is a quarter of an inch too high.
Diplomats privately say the evidence against Rusesabagina is solid. They are right. Whatever heroism he undertook during the anti-Tutsi genocide, and eyewitnesses and historians now dispute that, he threatened violence on video and his money transfers to terrorists show this was not rhetorical excess.
It seems, however, that for top Biden officials, celebrity trumps justice. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan met several times with Rusesabagina’s daughters. Last week, Blinken reportedly re-designated Rusesabagina as wrongfully detained. This effectively transfers Rusesabagina’s case from consular affairs to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens. It also spits in the face of Rusesabagina’s victims. For Biden’s team, black lives matter except when victims are African.
Even if Hollywood’s depiction of Rusesabagina was accurate, it should be irrelevant to crimes subsequently committed. To reclassify Rusesabagina as a victim rather than a perpetrator would be akin to suggesting Bill Cosby, facing another trial this week, should face no consequences for sexual assault because he was a model for a generation four decades ago.
Blinken’s about-face on Rusesabagina also shows a disturbing lack of seriousness when it comes to terrorism and its victims. Blinken, in contravention of the Taylor Force Act, resumed support to the Palestinian Authority and now effectively subsidizes its “pay to slay” policies that pay financial rewards to imprisoned terrorists. Blinken also supports lifting or simply failing to enforce sanctions on Iran even as it continues to seize foreign hostages.
The policy implications go far beyond Rusesabagina, who is not even a U.S. citizen. To reclassify him as a “hostage” plays into the hands of terror-sponsoring states such as Iran who draw an equivalence between the true hostages they seize and Iranian agents convicted on the facts. Blinken’s actions will also convince autocrats such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who regularly demands that the U.S. override the judiciary, that persistence can trump justice.
Hollywood tells a good story, but for Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan to confuse it with reality or signal those whom Hollywood lionizes have a literal get-out-jail-free card sets a horrendous precedent — one that undercuts American moral authority to combat real hostage-taking worldwide.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
