[Peace-discuss] Hot air in Cairo

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Obama's people apparently thought that the polished persiflage that went down 
well in the presidential campaign would also work in the region where the US is 
spending billions to kill people.  Obviously it didn't.  As an earlier President 
said, "I could go on and on, but you know the facts..."  --CGE]


	Thu 04 Jun 2009
	Speech Therapy: Pretty Words in Cairo Hide Brutal Realities of Power 			Written 
by Chris Floyd

We are told that Barack Obama gave a  "major address" on the subject of 
US-Muslim relations. He was speechifying in Cairo, capital of one of the most 
repressive regimes in the Middle East, following a sleepover with the Saudi 
king, Abdullah, ruler of one of the most repressive regimes on earth.

Regarding the deep impact of this landmark event, we defer to the observations 
of Professor As'ad AbuKhalil, who provides this incisive commentary:

     Who cares about what Obama will say or not say? I mean, why should people 
care about what the visiting White Man (yes, as soon as you run for the American 
presidency you assume the role of the White Man, regardless of the color of your 
skin) will preach to Egyptians and Muslims? I await that speech the way I await 
sequels to Rocky movies.


We heartily recommend the professor's website for a whole series of pertinent 
views on Obama's trip -- and for information and analysis of the region 
generally. He also points us to this piece by Hossam el-Hamalawy, who was 
graciously vouchsafed a small scrap of space in the New York Times:

     President Obama should not have decided to come to Egypt. The visit is a 
clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator 
who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers. No words 
that Mr. Obama will say can change this perception that Americans are supporting 
a dictator with their more than $1 billion in annual aid....

     As for the other host of the president’s visit, Al Azhar University, one of 
its students, Kareem Amer, is languishing in prison after university officials 
reported his “infidel, un-Islamic” views to the government, earning him a 
four-year sentence in 2007. In advance of the visit, Egyptian security forces 
have rounded up hundreds of foreign students at Al Azhar.

     We do want allies in the West, but not from inside the White House. Our 
real allies are the human rights groups and unions that will pressure the Obama 
administration to sever all ties to the Mubarak dictatorship. Their visits to 
Egypt are more meaningful, even if unlike Mr. Obama, they do not get a lavish 
reception.


We might also note the nature of President Obama's journey through the capital 
of this friendly, close American ally. From the NY Times:

     Mr. Obama arrived in Cairo at 9 a.m.  and was greeted by the Egyptian 
foreign minister, Ahmad Aboul Gheit. The streets surrounding the university and 
across the city were largely quiet and empty on Thursday. Many workers in the 
Egyptian capital had been told to stay home. The sidewalks were closed to 
people, but lined by hundreds of uniformed soldiers — some dressed in black, 
others in white — who had been standing in place for hours before Mr. Obama arrived.


As you can see, "they love him, they really love him," as Professor Juan Cole 
eagerly informed us earlier this week.

But strangely enough, even as the president was meeting with the unelected 
despot of Saudi Arabia and the authoritarian tyrant-for-life in Egypt, over in 
Iran -- which, as we all know, is the site of a monolithic mullah state bent on 
nothing less than the destruction of the world -- they were having a heated 
debate on national television, with the nation's president -- whom we all know 
is an absolutist dictator just like Adolf Hitler -- being roundly denounced by 
his political opponent, who assailed him for, among many other things, 
questioning the Holocaust.

(As we noted here last year, one of the most popular television shows in recent 
Iranian history was a series about an Iranian diplomat who worked to rescue Jews 
in wartime Paris. But nothing will shake the carefully cultivated Western 
caricature of Iran as a horde of slavering anti-Semites -- not even the fact 
there is a Jewish community, and Jewish member of Parliament, in Iran -- 
something you would never see in the judenfrei realm of Obama's "wise and 
gracious" friend, King Abdullah.)

During the speech, we heard many nicely-turned phrases and heartfelt pieties 
from President Obama as he sought to "correct the misunderstandings" that 
Muslims have about America and its benevolent policies around the world. But 
what speaks far more loudly to the reality of those policies is a small story 
already being shunted aside by the tsunami of gushing press devoted to the empty 
flapping of presidential jaws in Cairo -- the suicide of a Yemeni man held 
captive, without charges, in the Guantanamo concentration camp since 2002:

     A Yemeni captive died in an apparent suicide at the detention center for 
foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, the 
U.S. military said on Tuesday....A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad 
Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on 
Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died....

     The dead man had been held without charge at Guantanamo since February 
2002. He had been on hunger strikes in the past to protest his detention, but 
was not among the more than two dozen long-term hunger strikers currently being 
force-fed at the camp, a Guantanamo spokesman said....

     Human Rights First condemned the death as "a stark reminder of the 
inhumanity of indefinite detention without charges or trial." The American Civil 
Liberties Union said it illustrated the need to resolve the detainees' fate in a 
regularly constituted court with long-established rules.

     "There is no room for a system of indefinite detention without charge or 
trial under our Constitution," the ACLU said. "Those against whom there is no 
legitimate evidence must not be given a de facto life sentence by being locked 
up forever."


It would of course be superfluous in us to point out that the progressive 
president who even at this moment is in Cairo telling Muslims how they 
misunderstand American values is himself a staunch supporter of "indefinite 
detention" and "preventive detention" and is seeking ways to entrench these 
unconstitutional (not to mention immoral) concepts into a formalized imperial law.

But we would certainly not want the Muslim world to misunderstand America's 
abiding commitment to justice, freedom, liberty and peace. We are sure the 
president made it all crystal clear in this "major speech" from the heart of a 
brutal, repressive, American-funded regime. Let's just hope there are no major 
mass civilian slaughters in America's Terror War operations in the Muslim lands 
of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan today, after the president's lyrical waxing in 
Cairo about how America "rejects the same thing that people of all faiths 
reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children." That would sure put a 
crimp in the old PR.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/