Otto Warmbier Was a Jew

For all the stories about Otto Warmbier we have heard nothing about the fact that he was Jewish. It’s not just the media. Important Jewish organizations have remained silent about the fate of a young American who was abandoned by the Obama administration. After all, they cannot be expected to say anything that would make Obama look like he was disfavoring Jews.

Liel Leibovitz reports in Tablet:

Now that Otto Warmbier is dead, it’s time to ask what, if anything, might’ve been done to save the innocent young American from being detained and tortured by North Korea’s genocidal regime. To answer that question, it’s instructive to compare Warmbier’s case to those of two other Americans similarly seized and imprisoned by our enemies—Steven Sotloff and Jason Rezaian.

The Obama Administration, Warmbier’s father Fred said in a recent interview, urged a policy of inaction. “When Otto was first taken,” he recalled, “we were advised by the past administration to take a low profile while they worked to obtain his release. We did so without result.”

The Sotloffs, whose son, Steven, was a journalist kidnapped by ISIS in Syria, were given similar instructions. When they tried to raise the ransom money necessary for their son’s release, the Obama Administration, they said, warned them that negotiating with terrorists was out of the question. Steven was eventually executed in a gruesome beheading documented on camera and shared widely online.

As it happened, the Obama administration wanted to see the plight of Jason Rezaian played up in the media. Leibovitz suggests that since Rezaian had been kidnapped by the Iranians and since Obama wanted to make a deal with the Iranians he was happy to gin up support for whatever he had to do to trade Rezaian for planeloads of cash.

Leibovitz concludes:

To the victims of Obama’s legacy—which include the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Syria as the United States did nothing so as not to jeopardize the Iran Deal—add two more American families, the Sotloffs and the Warmbiers, whose personal tragedies are compounded by the silence forced on them by the previous administration.

In another, follow-up article Leibovitz calls out the American Jewish organization for their silence about Warmbier.

You’d think that the cluster of handsomely funded Jewish organizations that fly the banner of promoting and protecting Jewish life in America and abroad would notice and acknowledge Warmbier’s murder. So far, though, American Jewish officialdom has been deafeningly silent.

Why is this so? These organizations have been spending all their time bashing Donald Trump and defending notorious anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour. They pledged allegiance to Barack Obama and are leading the Resistance to Donald Trump:

The odious Anne Frank Center, whose disingenuous mission statement blathers on about a kinder and fairer world where Jewish children are safe from the death camps of tyrannical regimes, didn’t bother taking a break from bashing Donald Trump to lament a young Jew put to death by the world’s worst offender of human rights. Nor did the ADL, an organization quick to stand up with Linda Sarsour as she denied Jews their right to self-determination but not so swift when the victim was a young Jewish man whose crime was pulling a silly prank at his hotel while on a college tour of a nation that routinely starves, imprisons, and executes hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Everywhere you turn today, you hear no one demanding justice for Otto Warmbier.

In case you forgot about Linda Sarsour, James Kirchick recounts her monstrous views:

Linda Sarsour is a progressive-media darling. One of Essence magazine’s “Woke 100 Women,” Sarsour was named a leader of the Women’s March that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration, despite declaring that “nothing is creepier than Zionism”—though her wish to “take away” the “vagina” of clitoridectomy victim and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, upholding Saudi Arabia as a bastion of women’s lib, embrace of the terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh, and claim that “Shariah law is reasonable” because “suddenly all your loans & credits cards become interest-free,” are all—at least in my humble estimation—definitely creepier.

What do the social justice warriors have to say about Warmbier? They have been yelping about how Warmbier is a privileged white male, and thus that he deserved what he got:

What you do hear are the howls of the social justice brigades, for whom Warmbier, being white and a man, is mostly to blame for his own murder. When the young college student was arrested last year, the regressive left’s flagships, from Salon to the blessedly defunct Nightly Show, gleefully mocked Warmbier, arguing that white privilege was the real reason for his predicament and suggesting that when it came to oppression, there was really no difference between Portland and Pyongyang. “The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing,” opined a young blogger on the Huffington Post, “is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense.”