What could go wrong?
An Israeli-Canadian lobbyist hired by Myanmar’s junta will be paid $2 million to “assist in explaining the real situation” of the army’s coup to the United States and other countries, documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department show.
More than 60 protesters have been killed and 1,900 people have been arrested since Feb. 1, when Myanmar’s generals seized power and detained civilian leaders including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi.
Ari Ben-Menashe and his firm, Dickens & Madson Canada, will represent Myanmar’s military government in Washington, as well as lobby Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Russia, and international bodies like the United Nations, according to a consultancy agreement.
The Montreal-based firm will “assist the devising and execution of policies for the beneficial development of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, and also to assist in explaining the real situation in the Country,” read the agreement, submitted on Monday to the Justice Department as part of compliance with the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act and published online.
A spokesman for the Myanmar military government did not answer telephone calls from Reuters seeking comment.
In a pitch that has been met with widespread skepticism, Ben-Menashe told Reuters he had been tasked with convincing the United States that Myanmar’s generals wanted to move closer to the West and away from China. He said the generals wanted to resettle Rohingya Muslims who fled a 2017 military assault for which the United Nations has accused those same generals of overseeing a genocide.
I’m reminded of a story of a famous black drug dealer who got arrested and they sent a famous black lawyer in to talk to him and he said “get out of here – I want a Jew.” (That’s a true story, but I can’t find it on any of the searches because of censorship, so I don’t remember the details.)
People assume Jews are good at some things, and that’s because Jews are genuinely good at some things. Law is one, lobbying is another. They have relatively high verbal IQs. What’s more, in law, just as in government lobbying, they are working with other Jews, so if you have a Jew on your side, you know he’s going to have an immediate rapport with the people on the other side, and this could obviously help your situation.
However, in this particular situation, you have the problematic fact that it is Jewish interests that are attempting to force democracy on Burma. So, personally, I would not want a Jew involved in lobbying for me.
This could end up being something like what happened to Papa John, where the PR firm (which I assume was Jewish) that he hired to help his image ended up conspiring with board members to set him up saying the n-word on a voice recording. Those documents were recently unsealed.
I predict the exact same thing happening with Myanmar.
But Asians don’t really know about the Jews.
The military government of Myanmar has handled this situation just about as badly as they possibly could. And that is coming from someone who obviously supports authoritarian governments over democracy governments, on principle. They’re now reportedly shooting protesters, which is generally the final gasp of these sorts of regimes.
It would have been easy to do this and make it work. Asians don’t really understand or like democracy. But they just didn’t do it correctly. They screwed it all up. Now they’ve brought in a Jew who is almost certainly going to be working for the other side to undermine them.
I hate to say “they should have called me.” But they should have called me.