Last week, President Trump hosted a delegation of some two dozen victims of religious persecution from around the world. The diverse group, which included a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a Tibetan who fled China and a Rohingya Muslim chased out of Myanmar by a government-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing, huddled around the president’s desk at the Oval Office. They took turns explaining their plight to Trump and what drove them to escape their homelands for safe haven elsewhere.
It was already an awkward set piece, but it turned all the more cringeworthy with Trump’s comments. One exchange in particular — between the president and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Iraq who was raped and tortured and whose family members were murdered by the Islamic State — stood out. The president was not particularly attentive, only perking up when questioning Murad on how she could have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
View the complete July 26 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.