BY ROBERT FISK
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, 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 overreaction to 9/11,
its creation of Guantánamo 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 Mossadegh government of Iran in the ’50s.
It was "hard to overcome decades of mistrust".
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 would gladly bring every single 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, 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 the following day.
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", 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 the "cycle of suspicion and discord" – even if America and Islam
shared "common principles" which turned out to be "justice and progress,
tolerance 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 observation:
"Words are easy and many while great deeds are difficult and rare."
(Robert Fisk, an English journalist and author, is the
Middle East correspondent of the UK newspaper, The Independent. This
article was published in The Independent on June 5, 2009.)
Courtesy: The Independent;
www.independent.co.uk
