Thursday, June 4, 2009
"Obama neglected the legal rights of the Palestinian people and tried to shape the Palestinian cause as a humanitarian cause" - Mohamed al-Hindi, a senior Islamic Jihad leader.
BE WARNED, THE FOLLOWING ESSAY IS BASED ON ANTI-IMPERIALIST CONVICTIONS THAT ARE DISCORDANT WITH US FOREIGN POLICY...
It is Palestine's legal international right to exist as a state that was glossed over in the speech. Palestine is not asking for charity or a special favor but for justice. The US president praises Islam's cultural contribution, he is against bigotry. He does not want Islam stereotyped. Neither should the US be stereotyped as an imperial state. No,no,... the REAL problem is "violent extremists". These violent extremist militant types are the universal enemy - not the cruelly stereotyped USA or the good (pro-western) Muslims.
Obama's Statement is a reversal in tone vis-a-vis Bush's positioning on Israel and Palestine, in that Bush deliberately didn't say much, and pretty well left the Israelis to deal with the Palestinians according to their will. But I flinched at Obama's decidedly moralizing tone in the whole piece. He has visited King Tut I've heard, and it seems to have rubbed off. From henceforth I'll think of the US President as King 'tut-tut'. Tut-tut did not talk about the Palestinians legal right to RESIST Occupation and Usurpation under international law - and that is the core of the argument about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. He talked of "legitimate" Palestinian "aspirations". That is not a legal claim: it is not laying out a peace plan, it is about "hope" .Not strong ground for Palestine. Familiar rhetorical ground for Obama.
In fact it was excellent rhetorical ground for a discredited imperial power with very bloody hands that wants to be seen by the Muslim world to play the "honest broker" between Israel and Occupied Palestine after 50 years of doing everything possible to allow Israel to have everything!
'King tut-tut' did not mention the scores of UN declarations affirming Palestine that the US and one or two of its more obeisant client states have vetoed. He did not talk about the very crucial Palestinian legal right to return under international law.
Israel's aggressive intrusion into Arab territories is not identified by Obama as a problem. No, the MUSLIM/ARAB RESISTANCE is the problem, those "violent extremists" fighting back against The Empire is the problem...Is that King tut-tut's view of the American Minutemen and other Sniper Revolutionaries of the 1770s? Somehow I think not.
This may be conciliatory talk for a US president, an improvement on Bush, the Butcher of Baghdad, but it is not a declaration that the USA has reversed itself and is now in solidarity with the wretched of the earth in Refugee Camps from Gaza to the Swat Valley. In fact, it is an imperial exercise in evasion and doublespeak that skirts mercy and justice while cloaking itself in high sounding Philistine moralizing to its dependents.
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Posted by Andrew Taylor at 12:45 PM
