brilliant, honest intellect with a passionate heart. Arabic fluent, based
in Beirut for 20 years, he travels extensively and has more friends and
contacts with princes and paupers than our entire cabinet and Hillary's
Bill. If Edward Said were alive, I'd be doing the same, al least. BTW,
this is what Sonya Sotomayor meant about her own value. Imagine a
debate where Fisk would pose the questions he raises with President
Obama, who so far has not taken on an equal intellect with a different
POV around health, the economy, security or wars. Check it out.
Ed
Words that could heal wounds of centuries
President Obama reaches out to the Islamic world in a landmark speech
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK): June 5, 2009
Preacher, historian, economist, moralist, schoolteacher, critic, warrior,
imam, emperor. Sometimes you even forgot Barack Obama was the President of
the United States of America.
Will his lecture to a carefully chosen audience at Cairo University
"re-imagine the world" and heal the wounds of centuries between Muslims and
Christians? Will it resolve the Arab-Israeli tragedy after more than 60
years? If words could do the job, perhaps...
It was a clever speech we heard from Obama yesterday, as gentle and as
ruthless as any audience could wish for - and we were all his audience. He
praised Islam. He loved Islam. He admired Islam. He loved Christianity. And
he admired America. Did we know that there were seven million Muslims in
America, that there were mosques in every state of the Union, that Morocco
was the first nation to recognise the United States and that our duty is to
fight against stereotypes of Muslims just as Muslims must fight against
stereotypes of America?
But much of the truth was there, albeit softened to avoid hurting feelings
in Israel. To deny the facts of the Jewish Holocaust was "baseless, ignorant
and hateful", he said, a remark obviously aimed at Iran. And Israel deserved
security and "Palestinians must abandon violence..."
The United States demanded a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. He told the Israelis there had to be a total end to their
colonisation in the West Bank. "The United States does not accept the
legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
The Palestinians had suffered without a homeland. "The situation for the
Palestinian people is intolerable," Obama said and the US would not turn its
back on the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for a state of their own".
Israel had to take "concrete steps" to give the Palestinians progress in
their daily lives as part of a road to peace. Israel needed to acknowledge
Palestinian suffering and the Palestinian right to exist. Wow. Not for a
generation has Israel had to take this kind of criticism from a US
President. It sounded like the end of the Zionist dream. Did George Bush
ever exist?
Alas, he did. Indeed, at times, the Obama address sounded like the Bush
General Repair Company, visiting the Muslim world to sweep up mountains of
broken chandeliers and shredded flesh. The President of the United States -
and this was awesome - admitted his country's failures, its over-reaction to
9/11, its creation of Guantanamo which, Obama reminded us all again, he is
closing down. Not bad, Obama...
We got to Iran. One state trying to acquire nuclear weapons would lead to a
"dangerous path" for all of us, especially in the Middle East. We must
prevent a nuclear arms race. But Iran as a nation must be treated with
dignity. More extraordinarily, Obama reminded us that the US had connived to
overthrow the democratically elected Mossadeq government of Iran in the
Fifties. It was "hard to overcome decades of distrust".
There was more; democracy, women's rights, the economy, a few good quotes
from the Koran ("Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all
mankind".) Governments must respect "all their people" and their minorities.
He mentioned the Christian Copts of Egypt; even the Christian Maronites of
Lebanon got a look in.
And when Obama said that some governments, "once in power, are ruthless in
suppressing the rights of others", there was a roar of applause from the
supposedly obedient audience. No wonder the Egyptian government wanted to
select which bits of Obama's speech would be suitable for the Egyptian
people. They were clearly very, very unhappy with the police-state regime of
Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, Obama did not once mention Mubarak's name.
Over and again, one kept saying to oneself: Obama hasn't mentioned Iraq -
and then he did ("a war of choice... our combat brigades will be leaving").
But he hasn't mentioned Afghanistan - and then he did ("we do not want to
keep our troops in Afghanistan... we will gladly bring every one of our
troops home"). When he started talking about the "coalition of 46 countries"
in Afghanistan - a very dodgy statistic - he began to sound like his
predecessor. And here, of course, we encountered an inevitable problem. As
the Palestinian intellectual Marwan Bishara pointed out yesterday, it is
easy to be "dazzled" by presidents. This was a dazzling performance. But if
one searched the text, there were things missing.
There was no mention - during or after his kindly excoriation of Iran - of
Israel's estimated 264 nuclear warheads. He admonished the Palestinians for
their violence - for "shooting rockets at sleeping children or blowing up
old women in a bus". But there was no mention of Israel's violence in Gaza,
just of the "continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza". Nor was there a
mention of Israel's bombing of civilians in Lebanon, of its repeated
invasions of Lebanon (17,500 dead in the 1982 invasion alone). Obama told
Muslims not to live in the past, but cut the Israelis out of this. The
Holocaust loomed out of his speech and he reminded us that he was going to
the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp today.
For a man who is sending thousands more US troops into Afghanistan - a
certain disaster-to-come in the eyes of Arabs and Westerners - there was
something brazen about all this. When he talked about the debt that all
Westerners owed to Islam - the "light of learning" in Andalusia, algebra,
the magnetic compass, religious tolerance, it was like a cat being gently
stroked before a visit to the vet. And the vet, of course, lectured the
Muslims on the dangers of extremism, on "cycles of suspicion and discord" -
even if America and Islam shared "common principles" which turned out to be
"justice, progress and the dignity of all human beings".
There was one merciful omission: a speech of nearly 6,000 words did not
include the lethal word "terror". "Terror" or "terrorism" have become
punctuation marks for every Israeli government and became part of the
obscene grammar of the Bush era.
An intelligent guy, then, Obama. Not exactly Gettysburg. Not exactly
Churchill, but not bad. One could only remember Churchill's observations:
"Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare."
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