[Peace-discuss] Obama's epic-making speech??

[Brussel Morton K.]

I found the Obama speech full of smooth soothing phrases, but  
profoundly deceitful. Ali Abunimah (below) and Chomsky (See Carl's  
email)  both bring this out.

Bush too had kind words for Moslems. Of course the U.S. government  
doesn't want to alienate Moslems, even when killing them, so Obama's  
slick words mean nothing unless he follows up with actions by the  
government he is supposed to lead; the followup so far has been the  
anything but encouraging. His silence on Gaza when the atrocity there  
was occurring tell much more about his mentality and principles than  
his pretty words.

Will the Moslem world be long taken in by him? We'll see.

But then, what could we have expected, given all that has already  
taken place?

Finally, I must say that tuning in to DemocracyNow! and hearing Juan  
Cole's admiring analysis of the speech  was disgusting, and  
unchallenged.  He intimated, for example, that Obama was essentially  
powerless, as was the U.S.,  to change Israel's actions. BS!

Cole comes off like a shill. I hope Amy can find someone less brown- 
nosing next time for an analysis of Obama's program.

--mkb

Published on Thursday, June 4, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Obama in Cairo: A Bush in Sheep's Clothing?
His speech shows little real change. In most regards his analysis  
maintains flawed American policies intact

by Ali Abunimah
Once you strip away the mujamalat - the courtesies exchanged between  
guest and host - the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo  
indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is  
not necessary to divine Obama's intentions - he may be utterly sincere  
and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most  
regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can", there was much  
the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and  
Islam" - the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague  
construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more  
varied than similar.

Labelling America's "other" as a nebulous and all-encompassing  
"Islam" (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to  
avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilise people across  
many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to  
increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and  
economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition -  
and the resistance it generates - has now become for supporters of  
those interventions, synonymous with "Islam".

It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor's notion that  
"violent extremism" exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America's (and  
its proxies') exponentially greater use of violence before and after  
September 11, 2001. He dwelled on the "enormous trauma" done to the US  
when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word  
about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq -  
those whom Munathar al-Zaidi's flying shoe forced Americans to  
remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of  
civilians who die each week in the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, or  
the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.

As President George Bush often did, Obama affirmed that it is only a  
violent minority that besmirches the name of a vast and "peaceful"  
Muslim majority. But he seemed once again to implicate all Muslims as  
suspect when he warned, "The sooner the extremists are isolated and  
unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer."

Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about  
Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the  
Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation  
of Israel. "It is also undeniable," the president said, "that the  
Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit  
of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of  
dislocation."

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They  
already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed  
and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds  
that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still  
so hard to say?

He lectured Palestinians that "resistance through violence and killing  
is wrong and does not succeed". He warned them that "It is a sign of  
neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to  
blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is  
claimed; that is how it is surrendered." (Note: the last suicide  
attack targeting civilians by a Palestinian occurred in 2004)

Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would  
impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered  
1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping,  
fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? Did he  
think his listeners would not remember that the number of Palestinian  
and Lebanese civilians targeted and killed by Israel has always far  
exceeded by orders of magnitude the number of Israelis killed by Arabs  
precisely because of the American arms he has pledged to continue  
giving Israel with no accountability. Amnesty International recently  
confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated  
ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last November 4, prompting retaliatory  
rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much  
bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what  
happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates  
anything but a commitment to full truth-telling.

Some people are prepared to give Obama a pass for all this because he  
is at last talking tough on Israeli settlements in the occupied West  
Bank. In Cairo, he said: "The United States does not accept the  
legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction  
violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace.  
It is time for these settlements to stop."

These carefully chosen words focus only on continued construction, not  
on the existence of the settlements themselves; they are entirely  
compatible with the peace process industry consensus that existing  
settlements will remain where they are for ever. This raises the  
question of where Obama thinks he is going. He summarised  
Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" as being the establishment of a  
"state". This has become a convenient slogan to that is supposed to  
replace for Palestinians their pursuit of rights and justice that the  
proposed state actually denies. Obama is already on record opposing  
Palestinian refugees' right to return home, and has never supported  
the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live free from racist  
and religious incitement, persecution and practices fanned by Israel's  
highest office holders and written into its laws.

He may have more determination than his predecessor but he remains  
committed to an unworkable two-state "vision" aimed not at restoring  
Palestinian rights, but preserving Israel as an enclave of Israeli  
Jewish privilege. It is a dead end.

There was one sentence in his speech I cheered for and which he should  
heed: "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one  
nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail."

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the  
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and a fellow with the Palestine Centre in  
Washington, DC.  Abunimah is Executive Director of The Electronic  
Intifada.



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