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By Ray Hanania

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Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, America began to build up its reputation as the leader of the free world.

One of the most important aspects of carrying that title was to lead the fight to champion freedom and to speak out against human rights violations, injustices and government-sanctioned crimes, especially against innocent civilians.

But as we have been learning over the years, injustice is in the eye of the political beholder. If you are one of our allies, you can commit crimes without being the target of American indignation or consequences.

Ray Hanania

Our friends get a pass. Our enemies do not.

So, when Israel carpet-bombs the Gaza Strip, killing both Hamas militants and Palestinian civilians, we tend to shrug it all off. America doesn’t care.

But when Sudan forces target civilians in their decade-long war, President Joe Biden and Antony Blinken issue declarations that government forces are guilty of war crimes because they are killing civilians in the conflict.

Some civilians are important and some are not. It doesn’t depend on their ethnicity, race or nationality at all. It depends on how Washington feels about the power committing the war crimes. Is it a nation that the U.S. has little political ties or interests? Or, is it a nation that lobbies this country’s politicians with so much money we’re afraid to disrupt that stream of favors?

Such is also the case with Ukraine, in which many American politicians screamed about the Russian threat, an ally of the Chinese threat.

Apparently, being the “leader of the free world” has a statute of limitations on how long you need to carry that title in specific cases.

Americans are busy with other conflicts, like the high-powered, politically-driven conflict in the Gaza Strip, where we scream about injustices and carnage against some people, based on their religion, and ignore the injustices and carnage against others (again) based on their religions.

Never cared for have been the Christian Arabs, who by the way are the majority of Arabs who live in America. Those Christian Arabs criticize Israeli government policies just as much as Muslims, which explains why no one cares for the plight of Christian Arabs in the Holy Land.

“Holy Land?” Maybe we should call it for what it really is for America: the “Hypocrisy Land.”

We are pretty much doing to Ukraine now what we did to the people who stood by our side during important conflicts, like in Vietnam–when we used the South Vietnamese people as our foundation to confront Communism there, and then tired of it and abandoned them to be murdered by the Viet Cong Communists who took over.

I served during the Vietnam War but got in just as Americans were tiring of the conflict, in part, because of all the lies and revelations that our soldiers were committing many of the civilian massacres we claimed had justified our involvement in the war in the first place. So, instead of blaming the politicians, we instead blamed the soldiers who returned.

Many Vietnam soldiers are among the majority of veterans among this nation’s 600,000 homeless. Who cares about them when we have the migrants to worry about? Migrants drive emotions especially in the Hispanic community, a minority exploited mainly by Democrats for votes.

We did that in Afghanistan and Iraq confronting Al-Qaeda terrorists and milking them financially. Halliburton was owned by Vice President Dick Cheney, who lied about WMDs. It made billions there, and then we walked away–abandoning people we sanctimoniously claimed we would help.

If the terrorists threaten us again, maybe we’ll stand up and fight. Who knows in this country, especially in the year of an election.

Elections define who we are and energize hypocrisies on every level. We hate politicians because of policies we dislike, but we close our moral eyes when it comes to politicians we like.

I mean, everyone was jumping on the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile sex fanatic who was the pal of nearly every powerful person in America because of his wealth.

They assert Epstein committed suicide while in one of America’s most secure prisons in New York. But I believe he was murdered to silence him from exposing the many politicians and celebrities who went to his island and sexually molested children there.

We only believed it when the lead story identified Donald Trump as one of Epstein’s buddies but seem to suddenly fact-check into oblivion equally significant facts about the involvement of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons were never involved in any sexual problems, right? So let’s take them out of the sordid Epstein story.

It’s all truly embarrassing.

Ray Hanania is a former Chicago City Hall reporter and award-winning columnist. Visit hanania.com for more opinion.