Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
Four Points on Syria
picture by Ali Farzat
1. Obama Should Shut Up
Obama’s claim that the Syrian regime is receiving Iranian assistance to repress protests is a statement which could inflame sectarian hatred inside Syria, as Obama’s Zionist advisors know very well. (This because Iran is Shia, a target of Saudi-Wahhabi propaganda, and the Syrian dictator is an Alawi, whereas the majority of Syrians are Sunnis). Obama gave no evidence to support his claim. The regime may be using Iranian bullets and tear gas. The Egyptian, Tunisian, and Libyan regimes have recently used American bullets and tear gas against their respective peoples. And America has offered its full support to the Saudi occupation of Bahrain and the Khalifa reign of terror there, which includes midnight arrests, extrajudicial executions, the destruction of Shia mosques, and assaults on hospitals and medical staff. The United States continues to assist the same dictatorships it has assisted for decades, and to function as the lifeline of the Zionist apartheid state. Obama’s statement could be a message to the Asad regime: if you distance Iran and the resistance, we will help you survive this crisis. But the Asad regime knows its only popularity arises from its support of resistance. Alternatively, Obama may have decided that Bashaar will fall, and the message is to the Syrian people, to encourage sectarian hatred amongst them and make it more difficult for them to build a stable, inclusive nation after the Asads capable of confronting the Zionist project.
Demonising Iran
This was published in the Sunday Herald.
Two manifestations of Iranian modernity
The mainstream media narrative of events unfolding in Iran has been set out for us as clear as fairytale: an evil dictatorship has rigged elections and now violently suppresses its country’s democrats, hysterically blaming foreign saboteurs the while. But the Twitter generation is on the right side of history (in Obama’s words), and could bring Iran back within the regional circle of moderation. If only Iran becomes moderate, a whole set of regional conflicts will be solved.
I don’t mean to minimise the importance of the Iranian protests or the brutality of their suppression, but I take issue with the West’s selective blindness when it gazes at the Middle East. The ‘Iran narrative’ contains a dangerous set of simplicities which bode ill for Obama’s promised engagement, and which will be recognised beyond the West as rotten with hypocrisy.
The Green Still Resists
In one of the most contentious sections of his thoroughly contentious Cairo speech, Obama declared:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. 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.”
It’s difficult to know where to start with this. Perhaps by registering just how insulting it is for the representative of the imperial killing machine – responsible directly and indirectly for millions of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia – to lecture the dispossessed and massacred Palestinians on their occasional attempts to strike back. We can be sure that the sleeping children Obama is concerned with here are the Israeli children who live on the stolen land of Palestine, not the unsleeping, traumatised children of Gaza, several hundred of whom were burnt and dismembered six months ago. Then it’s worth remarking how the erudition and intelligence shown in Obama’s pre-presidential book ‘Dreams from my Father’ have been immediately crushed on his assumption of the presidency. How otherwise could his historical vision be so partial and simplistic? There was certainly a key non-violent aspect to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, but pretending that violence played no role in the process makes it necessary to ignore the American Civil War (half a million dead), Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and rioting Chicago. Violence, or the threat of violence, was important in South Africa and India too, and certainly in Obama’s ancestral Kenya, and was the dominant anti-imperial strategy in Vietnam and Algeria.
Ali Abunimah on Obama’s Lecture
Palestinian Obama. Zan Studio
Personally, I found it unpleasant to see Obama lecturing the Arabs, and the handpicked audience clapping as ecstatically as trained apes whenever the President (rather like Napoleon in Cairo) made an Islamic allusion. No matter that he said ‘hajib’ intead of ‘hijab’. Most depressingly, Obama’s address was heavily influenced by the Bernard Lewis school of Orientalism – Arab and Muslim anger is caused by the cultural trauma of modernity and a “self-defeating focus on the past,” rather than by very present realities, such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the destabilisation of Pakistan and Somalia, the unwelcome military bases in the Muslim world, and the support of dictatorial regimes such as Mubarak’s. Obama’s assumptions repeated falsities, such as the notion that Arab regimes focus on Palestine to distract the people from their own failings. In fact the Arab regimes do everything they can to take the focus off Palestine, as the Palestinian tragedy is the key symbol of the bankruptcy of the client regimes. And Obama mocked violent resistance while not saying a word about the 1400 just killed in Gaza or the million slaughtered in Iraq.
The best response I’ve seen to the speech is by Ali Abunimah, who studies Obama’s phrases well: “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?” Ali goes on:
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.
Qunfuz 