George Jonas. The Ottawa Citizen. May 1, 2000, Monday.
TORONTO - Elian Gonzalez is lucky. The last time U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno expressed concern for the welfare of children, it was in Waco, Texas. The objects of the attorney general's solicitude ended up incinerated. Elian is only going to end up in Fidel Castro's banana-gulag in Cuba.
No big deal, compared with a fiery death. At six, Elian is likely to outlive the island's mangy comic-opera dictator by a healthy margin. With luck, by the time Elian reaches his teens, the decrepit Castro (and the moth-eaten Reno) will only be a bad memory.
Perhaps to ease the transition, Reno managed to give Elian a taste of Cuba in the United States. She sent her special agents in a pre-dawn raid to take Elian at gunpoint from his great-uncle's house in Miami. Thanks to a photo from the Associated Press, we know exactly what the moment looked
like. One wonders how Reno's favourite pediatrician, Dr. Irwin Redlener -- who last week considered life with the Miami relatives ''psychologically abusive'' for Elian -- would evaluate the trauma of a riot- geared officer tearing a child from the hands of the fisherman who rescued him at sea.
U.S. President Bill Clinton and his attorney general repeatedly described their actions as ''upholding the law.'' This was somewhere between a quarter-truth and an outright lie. Amazingly, the media never called them on it.
U.S. law didn't require the attorney general to revoke Elian's ''parole'' through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or transfer him from his uncle's custody to his father's. The law only gave Reno the discretion to do so. She elected not to have the INS grant an asylum hearing to
Elian or let the case proceed as a custody matter in a Florida state court for her own reasons -- and those of her boss, the president. The law, at most, let her do it; it didn't make her.
Of course a father should have his boy, and a boy should have his father. This is what I wrote months ago. But America's lefties didn't do it for either Elian or his father. They did it for Castro. Lefties would never have argued for sending Elian back to his father anywhere but in a communist
tyranny.
The point left-wingers set out to prove wasn't that a parent, regardless of politics, should retain authority over his child. This is a fine principle, but not one for which lefties would lift a finger. What they lifted not just a finger for but raised heaven and hell for was to justify their
youthful illusions about Castro.
Lefties on both sides of the 49th parallel pulled out their oldest cliches at the drop of a hat to defend the shabby dictator and his dilapidated island prison. At a Toronto dinner party I heard a lady lawyer, recently returned from a bicycle trip in Cuba, remark that, after all, Castro's
fiefdom has 100-per-cent literacy and health care.
Sure. And Hitler built the Autobahn, and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Much of the media in both the U.S. and Canada misreported the conflict as Florida's anti-Castro Cubans playing politics with a six-year-old child to demonize their Communist foe. But one hardly needs to demonize demons. It's not Cuban exiles in Miami who are demonizing communism; it's 1960s'
exiles in Washington who are trying to whitewash it.
Reuniting a six-year-old with his father is incidental. The left's real purpose is to validate Castro.
Yes, a six-year-old boy shouldn't be separated from his father for his father's political choices. In this case, however, there's a valid concern that the father's choices are coerced. Such a concern isn't dispelled by a motorcade taking the father to a Cuban mission inside the United States.
It isn't dispelled by the polished speeches of Gregory Craig, a slick Washington lawyer, whose hourly fees are likely to be in excess of Juan Miguel Gonzalez's monthly income. It remains an obvious question whether such a lawyer is speaking for Gonzalez or for Castro.
It's this question Clinton, Reno and much of the media have dodged. Instead, they preferred to provide aid for what is probably Castro's Last Stand.
Little Elian Gonzalez's tragedy demonstrates one thing. The chattering classes have their tongues at the ready. Whenever there is a Marxist jackboot stomping on a human face, there will always be a left-wing apologist to lick it.
George Jonas is a Citizen columnist. |