[Peace-discuss] Hypocrite in chief on Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Mon 22 Jun 2009
	Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil					Written by Chris Floyd


Professor As'ad AbuKhalil 
[http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/06/hypocrite-in-chief.html] rightly notes 
the rank hypocrisy of Barack Obama's statement on the turmoil in Iran:

     Obama has spoken: "The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be 
respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those 
rights." There is so much that you can do with this statement. The hypocrite in 
[chief] is invoking an argument that he himself so blatantly ignores and will 
continue to ignore to the last day of his presidency. Does he really believe in 
that right for peoples? Yes, but only in countries where governments are not 
clients of the US. Will he invoke that argument, say, in Saudi Arabia or Egypt 
or Morocco or Tunisia or Libya or Jordan or Oman, etc? Of course not. This is 
only an attempt to justify US imperial policies. And even in Iran, the Empire is 
nervous because it can't predict the outcome. But make no mistake about it: his 
earlier statement to the effect that the US can't for historical reasons "appear 
to be meddling" sets the difference between the Bush and the Obama 
administration. The Bush administration meddled blatantly and crudely and 
visibly, while the Obama administration meddles more discreetly and 
not-so-visibly. Tens of thousands of pens equipped with cameras have been 
smuggled into Iran: I only wish that the American regime would dare to smuggle 
them into Saudi Arabia so that the entire world can watch the ritual of public 
executions around the country.


I'd like to say an additional word about Obama's statement. When I saw that the 
president also invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King 
once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward 
justice’”),  I very nearly threw up. To quote an apostle of non-violence, who 
spent his last days standing with striking workers and railing against the 
American government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" 
because of its murderous war machine, when you yourself are in command of that 
war machine, spewing out Vietnam-style death (and "targeted assassinations") in 
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan; when you are striving with all your might to 
defend, shield and in many cases continue to heinous torture atrocities of your 
predecessor; when you are pouring trillions of public dollars into the purses of 
the financial elite while letting millions of workers go hang; and when you 
yourself have made repeated statements that you will never take any options "off 
the table" when dealing with Tehran, including the nuclear destruction of the 
Iranian people for whose liberties and well-being you now profess such noble 
concern -- well, that seems a bit much, if I may riot in understatement.

In other posts, AbuKhalil offers more good sense on the Iranian situation:

     The hypocrisy [of Western media coverage] is quite stunning. They are 
admiring the dare of the population when the Palestinian population shows more 
dare. They are outraged at the level of repressive crackdown by the regime when 
Israeli crackdowns on demonstrations are far more brutal and savage? They are 
admiring the participation of women in a national movement, when Palestinian 
women led the struggle from as far back as the 1930s (see the private papers of 
Akram Zu`aytir). They are outraged that the Iranian government is repressing 
media coverage, when the Israeli government is far more strict: when it was 
perpetrating slaughter in Gaza few months ago, the Western press was not allowed 
any freedom of movement except the hill of death where Michael Oren led 
reporters to watch Israeli brutal assualt on the Palestinian civilian population 
from a distance.

     The media coverage in the US and UK proves beyond a doubt that increasingly 
the Western press has been serving as a tool for the various Western government. 
If the government cheers, the media cheer, if the government condemns, the media 
condemns, etc. And would the Western media ever be as unrestrained in its 
glamorization and glorfication of demonstrators and demonstrations in Egypt or 
Saudi Arabia or Jordan as they are now? There are no claims of even covering a 
story anymore: it is merely how can we best help the beautiful demonstrators who 
are not bearded and whose women are more loosely veiled. This is not to say that 
the Iranian regime is not repressive and needs to be overthrown: far from that. 
But it is to say that the Iranian regime is as bad (in fact Saudi Arabia and 
Egypt are probably worse) and as unjust as the various Middle East governments 
that are supported by the Western governments and Western media. When Western 
media sit with Saudi and Egyptian leaders, it is as if they are sitting with a 
friend...


And for those who see the union-busting, privatizing Ahmadinajad as some kind of 
leftist champion of the poor and the oppressed, AbuKhalil notes:

     The rift I sense between Iranian left and Arab left is due to some 
admiration on the part of some in the Arab left for Ahmadinajad: that really 
angers people in the Iranian left. (And I am here with the latter group in that 
regard. I find Ahmadinajad's rhetoric of disservice to Palestine).


And for those who see the hidebound sectarian Moussavi as some kind of champion 
of "Western-style" pluralist democracy, AbuKhalil has these observations:

     I am very proud to be writing in a paper (Al-Akhbar) that is the only 
Arabic newspaper in the world that advocates for gay and lesbian rights. But the 
Western media are more impressed with a lackey of Ayatullah Khomeini who led the 
purges against leftists, Baha'is, and Jews in Iranian universities in the 1980s....

     I can't support a movement that writes its signs in English, in order to 
please the White Man, and I can't be in the same trench with Fox News. Yet, I 
support the overthrow of a regime that fed its people foreign policy slogans and 
religious jargon and (along with Saudi Arabia) fought all manifestations of 
secularism, leftism, and feminism in the Middle East since 1979 (much earlier in 
the case of Saudi Arabia).


Finally, AbuKhalil takes on the racist undertones that have crept into some 
Western championing of the Iranian uprising, particularly Andrew Sullivan's 
implication that the Iranians are more "capable" of democracy than Arabs:

     Andrew Sullivan responds to my critique ("As'ad AbuKhalil doesn't 
appreciate Americans' double standards [when he declares "why do Western media 
express outrage over a stolen election in Iran but they don't even feign outrage 
over lack of elections in Saudi Arabia?") by saying this: "Because Iran actually 
has a population capable of sustaining democracy; and Mousavi is as good as 
we'll get."

     Oh, you have to do better than this. What does these cliches mean? That the 
population "is capable of sustaining democracy"? Hardly the case if you measure 
it historically: I personally don't believe in the inequality of people as you 
seem to do; and I don't belive in those culural arguments that assumes one 
culture is hostile to democracy while others are not. It is fascinating that 
Iran is largly Islamic so they can't invoke the non-Islamic arugment, but Iran 
has produced two successive forms of dictatorships, so the attempt to separate 
the genetic makeup of Iranians from the Arabs is historically flawed.

     And the argument that Mousavi is "as good as we'll get" can't be reconciled 
with the history and presence of the man. Just yesterday, he released a 
statement that was dripping with religious demagoguery and was argument that his 
mission is really to prove the compatibilty of Islam with the republic. Mousavi 
does not miss an opportunity to to invoke the memory and teachings of Khomeini. 
People are forgetting that when Mousavi was prime minister and was engaged in a 
conflict with the then president Khamenei, Khomeini was invariably siding with 
Mousavi. So there is a history of close association with this so-called democrat 
with the teachings of Khomeini. Let us not kid ourselves: it is not about the 
charactertics of the population and not about the "as good as it gets" bogus 
argument: it is about cheering for anybody who sides against a government that 
oppoes the US.


In a world riddled with journalistic cant -- and thought-killing political and 
religious tribalism of every stripe -- AbuKhalil's perspective remains a most 
useful and astringent corrective.

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