It is too bad that Obama views the Middle East through his late father’s third world focus. He has fallen (as have many of his predecessors) into the narrative that “Palestine” is the key to peace when in reality the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel as a non-Arab, non-Islamic state is the crux of the problem. Obama’s belief in Turkey as a mediator in the Middle East (despite the daily evidence of Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism) is naivety at its worst (also Obama’s dropping of the Armenian genocide recognition is rather insulting and hypocritical) and shows the complete lack of professionalism in the Hillary Clinton State Department.
hat tip – Powerline
by Martin Peretz
Barack Obama’s initial six months in the presidency were rich in symbolics. No one could have misunderstood his intention when he anointed Al-Arabiya, Dubai-based and Saudi-owned, to be the first of the world’s television networks to interview him from the White House. Not surprisingly, the reporter began by asking what Obama meant when he promised “aggressive peacemaking between the Palestinians and the Israelis.” The president responded lamely by alluding to George Mitchell, his already-designated special envoy to the problem, as “somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.” As if the nasty Irish quarrel was at all comparable to the historical and meta-historical warfare between Zion and Araby. Then, two more fawning asides about Mitchell, thought of as the deus ex machina for the president’s predicament, and one allusion to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for having “great courage,” a prelude to Obama’s undignified curtsy in Riyadh.
When Obama speaks about Islam it is mostly blah, blah:
Did not Obama realize, did not his advisers tell him, that the very day he was addressing the Islamic orbit was the 30th anniversary of the shah’s abdication? The Ayatollah Khomeini wrote the acrid script for American-Islamic relations from 1979 onwards, exacerbating the ongoing conflict in Lebanon (where 17 American diplomats and then 241 US Marines were murdered in two separate incidents, and 56 French soldiers besides), sharpening the hostility of Syria toward the West, eroding the progressive reforms — yes, the shah’s progressive reforms — in Iran itself. And how about Obama’s careless reference to peace two decades back? The Gulf War, for one, which really was the beginning of the conflict against Saddam Hussein that has not yet ended, and, since it was always a sectarian conflict, will not likely end soon. The Afghan fratricide is an antique phenomenon, reinvigorated by Obama himself as the “yes, we can” war, but now being left to fester, ancient hatreds on ancient turf, and spread to the paradigmatic non-nation-state of Pakistan.
[.......]
Actually, no one expected Obama to call attention to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians on his visit to Turkey that April. Unlike the Germans, who are hewn to a philosophical tradition of guilt and remorse and have put themselves and their youth through an unforgiving struggle of conscience, Islam does not traffic in matters of collective guilt and remorse. These are not categories of the faith, and Obama did not nothing to disturb the self-satisfied temper of the faithful. Having anointed Recep Tayyip Erdogan his favorite Muslim, he brought comfort, if not exactly good cheer, to Ankara. The most brazen instance, given the fact that America is not a member of the European Union and that the Europeans do not trust him, was the president’s endorsement of Turkey’s admission to the common market. If anything, Obama’s advice left the continent very much peeved. Where does he come off telling us who is family?
He also had an assignment for Turkey in resolving the historic struggle between Israel and the neighborhood within which it lives. “Like the United States,” Obama declared in a sloppy, all-too-facile analogy, “Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security.” Now, the fact is that the editor of this very page was perhaps the first American journalist to chronicle the Erdoganian view of the world and his weird affinities for weirder allies. Already in 2006, he had noticed the prime minister’s weakness for the body parts blood libel implicating both Israel and our country. Apparently, neither the president nor his scriptwriters were aware of the cranky Ottomanist elements in Erdogan’s Middle East strategy. Anyway, Ankara has never let go of the Mavi Marmara pretension that you can break a legal international blockade against a rogue not-at-all statelet without cost or intervention. What was Netanyahu to do? Let the Turkish “humanitarians” run the blockade and invite anyone and everyone to follow suit?
The fact is that Obama is afflicted with a certain Turkomania, and it persuaded him that the US could trust Erdogan’s lead in Syria, way past the time he had shown that he was not inclined to do so. Erdogan suffers from Kurdophobia, which stays his hand in Syria, however much his early but sudden antagonism to the Assad regime in the civil war may have suggested otherwise. Indeed, as soon as Turkey let pass the shooting down of its bomber by Damascus, it no longer had credibility as a big player in the conflict. But Obama had trusted Erdogan to lead, and, predictably, he did not.
[.......]
The third of the president’s Middle East extravaganzas at the beginning of his tenure was the speech in Cairo. One doubts that Obama would be embarrassed by his text. After all, he does not make mistakes! But maybe, if we had a secretary of state like Dean Acheson or George Shultz instead of Hillary Clinton, he could be made to be mortified by its strange medley of geeky innocence and high moral cynicism. (Have you noticed on the State Department website feature, “Travels With The Secretary?” 102 countries, 352 travel days, 843,450 miles. This is not a formula for analytic depth.) Our chief executive clearly has no patience for depth, which may be why he and the mistress of our diplomatic corps get along so well. Even a cursory rereading of his June 2009 text would expose how deeply he does not understand the region and its doctrines, its peoples and their excuses. Virtually nothing — no fact, no insight — has survived from the president’s self-confident Al Aqsa prayer meeting only 38 months ago.
Of course, what Obama considered the most serious unsolved foreign challenge to the United States was the question of Palestine, or, to be more precise, the question of the Arabs of Palestine, now referred to as the Palestinians. The world has given them — through the United Nations with its various redundant organs (what do they all do?), the support of the sloppy moralists (like Norway, Sweden, unworthy South Africa) and the up-for-purchase so-called non-aligned — the phony backing that they see as near unanimous support. The fact is, the Palestinians are further away from having their Palestine than at anytime since 1967. Or maybe 1947. The General Assembly may in its next session sanction an Arab government called Palestine, as it did 65 years ago, when the British ran away from their Mandate while the Jews picked up half of it and turned an established society into a nation-state. What kept Arab Palestine from becoming Palestine at that time were Egypt and Jordan, and the fact that Palestinian society was a primitive and fractured collection of clans and tribes as far from nationhood as other countries which the British abandoned in the post-war period.
In any case, who really cares what the General Assembly does or, for that matter, what the Security Council does or does not do? Kofi Annan is the prototype for the UN: cocksure but irrelevant, really altogether beside the point. Nothing the UN does will affect the lives of the Palestinians. What keeps Palestine from becoming Palestine now is that most — indeed almost all — of the Palestinians do not recognize the Jewish state and its history. Which is really why they won’t negotiate. Which is also why they return again and again to the empty geographical formula of the armistice lines of 1949.
[.......]
It is a pity that Obama took his foreign policy imperative from Rashid Khalidi in fixing on the issue of Palestine as uniquely his own. The issue that is most important is Iran and nuclear weapons, and this has also fundamentally affected the Palestine question. If Iran secures the bomb, so will Saudi Arabia, Turkey, even Egypt. For three and a half years Obama deceived himself into thinking that somehow he had, he could, he would, with suasion and goodwill, talk the Persians into giving up the ultimate weapon. Then he did “sanctions,” ever so slowly and piecemeal. Did the president not grasp the urgency of time? The further Iran went in securing the atom for itself, the more difficult it would be for it to give it up. That is where we are now: Iran on the cusp of possession, the Arabs in agitated nowhere, the Palestinians fooling themselves that statehood is only a step or two away. And Israel? A free and pleasant place to visit and to live, with many grounds, both old and new, to worry.
Read the rest – What Obama talks about when talks about Islam
Tags: Martin Peretz
He is reverential about Islam, as was his predecessor.
@ Speranza:
And then his old man left Islam, and y’all know what the Penalty for that is. Makes you wonder about that car crash which killed him thirty years ago….
Macker wrote:
The old man was another Mugabe wannabe.
@ Speranza:
Obama views Islam as a 3rd world movement.
Obama’s affinity for Islam may have to do with his father, at least in part.
But it is important to remember that the Islamists, Marxists and separatists of the Civil Rights Movement made common cause with the “Palestine Liberation Organization” from the moment it was formed, in 1964. Note that this was three years before the 1967 war; Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, respectively—not by Israel. The newly-formed PLO was created to “liberate the occupied land” of Israel itself; in other words, to destroy Israel. It in no way agitated for a nation-state for the newly-invented “Palestinian” Arabs.
The Islamists, Marxists and separatists of the Civil Rights Movement had many kinships with the newly-formed PLO. Both were informed by the Marxist anti-colonialist writings of Frantz Fanon (it is here we see the connection to Obama pere et fils); both believe in violent, murderous terrorism against the “colonialists” (consider the Black Panthers and similar groups as attempts to be domestic versions of the PLO); both presided over unproductive populations largely welfare-dependent.
The real tragedy—and danger—is how deeply this symbiotic sympathy has infected even putatively conservative American blacks. Condoleezza Rice, for instance, is on record as believing that “Palestinian” children killed in clashes with Israeli troops are the equivalent of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. As far as Barack Obama and his wife are concerned, both of them grew up marinated in the most radical black revolutionary ideologies (consider their twenty-year attendance in Jeremiah Wright’s church). The radical black domestic sympathy with the “Palestinians” has been currency in this country since Obama was three years old. It is no wonder that he carries hatred for Israel in his marrow, nor that his Administration, which is chock-full of radical blacks (including the current US representative to the UN) exhibits this ideology.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Black Radicals view Arabs as Blacks. I am not joking.
Rodan wrote:
I’m sure you’re not; it’s probably the source for all that “Jesus was a black Palestinian” garbage.
@ Rodan:
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Pretty ironic given that the arab-ick word for a black person also means slave.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Yup, you got it..
To the sophisticated elite, electing a guy named
Barack Hussein Obama seven years after the 9/11
attacks probably shows tolerance.
They see no problem with a president who comes
from a Muslim family on his mothers side & who studied
the Koran in Jakarta.
On the other hand, I think that it’s nuts.
It would be nice if Mittens would refer to Palestinians by their real names, “Arabs!” There are no Palestinians or there would have been a leader before Arafish. Hence forth they shall be called, “The Arabs formally known as Palestinians before being Arabs.”
rgranger wrote:
An entirely made up nationality.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
“Abed” which means “slave” in Arabic also means “Black”.
Speranza wrote:
The black nationalists love to claim kinship with ancient Egypt. Among the items recovered from Tutankhamen’s tomb was a pair of sandals showing Ethiopians painted on the bottom, so that they could be symbolically trodden on by the Pharaoh wearing them.
Rodan wrote:
That is probably why some people refer to them as “Sand [N-word]s”….
Speranza wrote:
I would love to know how that relates to the surname “Abedin,” a prominent name, currently, in our State Department.
In Arabic Abedin means “worshipers”
mohammod thought a lot about blacks
“You should listen to and obey your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.”
mawskrat wrote:
His dick probably looked like a raisin.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
Why do they refer to her as being “beautiful”? She has lips that look as if they could give a hickey to the state of Ohio.
mawskrat wrote:
<
That’s what makes all of the conversions by Blacks to
Islam so absurd.
Muslims will make common cause with Blacks when it suits
them. But at the end of the day they view them as inferior,
only to be used or dominated.
Speranza wrote:
It has been frequently noted here that leftists do not believe in objective truth, but rather in relativism. Have you seen her next to Hillary? She’s gorgeous—relatively speaking.
@ RIX:
Hence the tie-in to “slave”. The Mohammedans believe we’re all slaves of the devil they worship.
Iron Fist wrote:
They wouldn’t have approved of all the runaway slaves who were at the gun show this weekend.
@ Speranza:
well Bar Refaeli is pretty
Iron Fist wrote:
Yes, I have seen pictures of Muslim demonstrations
with signs, “Jesus is Allahs slave”
Celebrate diversity!
there is no fun in Islam
RIX wrote:
There is an old joke about a religious Jew who goes to Heaven. He’s asked, “Would you like to meet Moses?” and of course he is most eager to do so. He’s sitting talking to Moses, and Moses says, “Would you like to meet Jesus?” He says, well, gee, I don’t know, and Moses says, “Hey, we’re all friends here; he’s a nice guy—you’ll like him.” So he’s sitting and talking with Moses and Jesus and having a great time, when he asks, “Well, I don’t know if I should ask, but what about Mohammed?” Moses says, “Say, I’m glad you reminded me. Mohammed! Bring us three coffees!”
@ buzzsawmonkey:
I like it.
RIX wrote:
They have no problems insulting other faiths.