In yesterday’s post, I mentioned an earlier commentary Hyman references in his most recent one. In it, he attacks the Clinton Foundation (a bête noire of conservatives and key player in many anti-Clinton conspiracy theories). One can rightly ask why he would bother doing this months and months after the election, and the answer is fairly obvious: throwing out potential "scandals" can create noise in the system that might minimally reduce attention to the growing Trump/Russia scandal.
I won’t delve into it too deeply, but suffice it to say, it’s another tour de force in poor argumentation.
Hyman’s ire about the Clinton Foundation is raised by alleged skullduggery in Bangladesh(!). Hyman spins a narrative about an innocent victim of the dastardly Clintons:
Sajeeb Wazed Joy is a permanent U.S. resident. He’s lived here for nearly two decades. He also happens to the son of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. This is where the problems began, according to the Dhaka Tribune.
Bangladesh authorities began investigating Grameen Bank in 2010. The bank’s managing director was Muhammad Yunus. He also happened to be a big donor to the Clinton Foundation.
According to Joy, State Department officials began threatening him. He was warned he would be audited by the IRS unless he convinced his mother, the Bangladesh prime minister, to end the investigation of the Clinton Foundation donor.
It certainly sounds as if poor Mr. Joy and his mom were treated unfairly in order to protect some ne’er-do-well fat cat donor to the Clinton Foundation, right?
Well, if we go *behind* “Behind the Headlines”, we discover something a bit different.
See, Muhammad Yunus is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, the prize was given to him specifically because of his founding of Grameen Bank, a bank that specializes in micro loans to impoverished citizens in Bangladesh (of whom there are more than a few).
Joy’s mama, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh? She’s a corrupt leader who carries out vendettas against anyone she sees as a political threat and who has been lackluster at best in her government’s reaction to the killing of Westerners, LGBT individuals, Christians, etc. by Islamic extremists. Amnesty International has condemned the treatment of the government’s repression of media.
For their trouble, Amnesty International was accused by Mr. Joy of being a “puppet” of foreign governments intent on destabilizing his mother’s government.
And indeed the very investigation into Yunus that Hyman suggests was improperly imperiled by the meddling Clintonites was the result of the prime minister’s personal crusade against a popular figure who might pose a political risk to her regime—a crusade that has been criticized in many quarters around the globe.
So Joy’s allegations about State Department interference were not the protestations of someone caught up in events with no axe to grind. He is hardly someone who “happens” to be the son of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. He is a paid consultant to his mother’s government, and therefore someone who had every reason to come up with an alternative narrative to the one that was being spun out by observers: that his mother was running a corrupt government that, as part of ongoing attempts to quash and silent dissent, was using the power of the government to go after a potential political rival.
Fortunately for Mr. Joy, his narrative found a willing and gullible audience among the Clinton-phobic far right (including one Mr. Mark Hyman).
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