: Joe Biden’s Democracy Summit Is the Height of Hypocrisy #WorldNEWS Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro walk into a democracy summit. But this isnt a joke. Having recently abandoned

Joe Biden’s Democracy Summit Is the Height of Hypocrisy #WorldNEWS
Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro walk into a democracy summit. But this isnt a joke.
Having recently abandoned Afghanistan to an Islamist autocracy and famine, and now finalizing a 0 million arms sale to Saudi Arabia, President Joe Biden thought it would be a fine idea to hold a two-day virtual gathering on democracy, where some of its worst offenders could pose as responsible upholders of freedom and dispense homilies on how to save the world from those like themselves.
According to the State Department, the goal is to “provide a platform for leaders to announce both individual and collective commitments, reforms, and initiatives to defend democracy and human rights at home and abroad. ” The online forum, it says, will solicit “bold, practicable ideas” on the themes of “defending against authoritarianism,” “fighting corruption,” and “promoting respect for human rights. ”
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But there is no explanation as why some countries that are far from democratic have been invited. More than 30 percent of the 110 invited countries are classified by U. S. -based non-profit Freedom House as only “partly free. ” Three are “not free” at all—Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iraq. More than a dozen are classified by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute as “electoral autocracies” including the Philippines, India and Kenya.
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Some of the omissions from the participant list are as puzzling as the inclusions. It’s not clear, for example, why strongmen like Indias Modi, the Philippines Duterte and Brazils Bolsonaro made the cut, but Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t, when all of them have been wrecking democratic institutions in their respective countries with equal vigor. There is no logic as to why an invitation was extended to Pakistan (which spared the Biden administration any further embarrassment by declining it). It is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, with a military-backed government that came to power through a heavily rigged election, and is notorious for rights violations. Nor does it make sense that an invitation was denied to Singapore, which may be a de facto one-party state, but it holds clean elections and offers a quality of life and security to its people that many invitees at the summit would kill for. (That is why public trust in politicians in Singapore is far higher than in the countries participating in the summit—higher, even, than in the host country itself. )
Speaking in Islamabad on Thursday, Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, said his country had no intention of becoming a part of any political bloc.