Monday, on MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews compared Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, to Uday and Qusay Hussein.
This is not a drill. Here’s the exact quote:
“Do you think this bothers the country to have sort of a Romanov royal family running the place? Because let me just say, you know, we kid, I kid about everything, but Uday and Qusay working for Saddam Hussein. You couldn’t go to a restaurant and have eye contact with one of those guys without getting killed. These people are really powerful. Imagine getting into a fight in the office with Jared or Ivanka – they have enormous power, and they’re always going to be there.”
Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of Saddam Hussein, were the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Clubs in the U.S. military’s “Deck of 55,” a set of playing cards denoting Iraq’s most wanted during the war. Qusay was the more temperate brother; Uday was much more depraved.
The following is a short list of Qusay’s crimes:
He “masterminded a concealment effort of remarkable complexity that succeeded in hiding the extent of Iraq’s illegal weapons programmes for several years,” according to The Telegraph.
When the first Gulf War ended, Qusay was put in charge of smothering Shiite uprisings. TIME reports eyewitness testimony in which “Qusay, dressed in gray trousers and a blue jacket, arrive in Suera, where armed guards herded 300 Shiite detainees onto a field. The President’s son, dangling a pistol in his right hand, walked up to the men and shot four of them in the head.” He then ordered the rest killed.
Human Rights Watch reports that “Qusay implemented the revenge killings and terror after the uprising that followed the Persian Gulf war in 1991.”
Qusay also “directed the execution of 15 families in Saddam City,” according to TIME.
The following is a short list of Uday’s crimes:
He “bludgeoned to death Kamal Hana Gegeo,” one of Saddam’s aides, in front of a large crowd, including the wife of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, reports The New York Times.
He allegedly had his bodyguards kidnap a 14-year-old girl he saw at a party so that he could rape her. Uday returned the girl several days later. When her father, a prominent figure, went public with the matter, Uday “had another demand: that the [father] bring his daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party.” Uday allegedly threatened the father’s life, and claimed his young daughters as girlfriends.
A maid says she witnessed a guard forcibly disrobe a young bride “and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday’s mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom.”
According to a butler, Uday once “demanded that his aides bring him a woman who had just had a baby…[he] sucked her nipples for what he believed would be vitamin-rich milk.”
A maid claims she saw “[Uday] lop off the ear of one of his guards and then use a welder’s torch on his face.”
Additionally, TIME reports that Uday allegedly had his friend’s tongue cut out with a scalpel so he couldn’t speak of the psychopath’s atrocities.
Uday would keep people in coffins, beat them, and place disappointing athletes into an Iron Maiden.
The Telegraph records a chilling report from Latif Yahia, Uday Hussein’s body double: “On one occasion, in a jail back in ’91, I remember Uday dealing with a Shia prisoner who had been involved in the uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War. He said: ‘I won’t kill you by the gun,’ and instead put a drill through his head. When he’d finished, he looked around and said: ‘This is what happens to those who stand up against us.’”
Uday and Qusay Hussein were two of the most evil individuals ever to walk the earth. To compare those two inhuman creatures – even in an oblique fashion – to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner is unconscionable. It’s not only shockingly inappropriate, but it dulls the American people’s intellectual and emotional senses to the reality of wickedness.
Just as comparing President Donald Trump’s policies to those implemented during the Holocaust demeans those who suffered under the Third Reich, comparing Ivanka Trump and Kushner to the Hussein brothers cheapens the agony of all who were tortured, raped, and murdered under the late-Ba’athist regime.
