Viewpoint

Editor’s Note:

How is Obama viewed in the Middle East and specifically
the Palestinian community? Here is a cogent piece by
Ali Abunimah, a frequent contributor to Viewpoint.

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Video Clip Of The Week

Scientists Found Thermite In 9-11 Rubble! Part 1

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Part 2
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Obama: A Bush in sheep’s clothing
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-encompass-
ing “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 state-
ments 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?

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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 settle-
ments will remain where they are for ever.

This raises the question of where Obama thinks he is going.
He summarized 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.”

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada

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