So it’s a relief that, policies aside, the fact remains that merely by being who he is (mixed race, island-bred, with a Muslim father, with teenage years spent in a Muslim country, and thoughtful, intelligent and educated beyond any prior US president, to boot), Obama is the gift that goes right on giving.
There has never been an American president remotely like him. There has never been an American president with any right, bar the banal right conferred by brute power, to talk to the world and expect the world to listen.
So there he was on Thursday, at Cairo University, talking about America and Muslims in a way no American president before him could possibly have talked. And you could feel the shock waves going out into both his American and Muslim audiences, though it’s impossible to say to what ultimate effect.
Except among the diehard haters on both sides, of course. At home, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party (which is mostly lunatic fringe these days, as that party withers: cf Bob Herbert’s ‘The Howls of a Fading Species,’ NYT, June 2) sobbed and cursed; there was Obama “apologizing for America” to “America’s enemies” once again.
(In his Cairo speech, Obama had acknowledged that the Iraq war, Guantanamo and the Bush-Cheney torture programme were all corruptions of American ideals; that the Palestinians’ situation was “intolerable”; that in 1953 “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government”; and that Iran “should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power.”)
Rush Limbaugh, the hysterical and racist talk-show host with, nonetheless (or maybe, therefore), a radio show audience of 15 million in the guns-’n-churches backwaters of the American South, averred that Obama was on a par with al Qaeda in “destroying America.”
And more than one Fox News commentator denounced Obama for never mentioning “democracy,” a startlingly malevolent lie, as Obama’s Praetorian Guard at MSNBC, Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, promptly demonstrated by replaying the four sections of the speech in which he did.
Likewise, the mirror-images of the likes of Limbaugh on the Muslim side lost no time in denouncing Obama. Indeed (betraying, for the third time in six months, their terror of an African-American US president named Barack Hussein Obama), both bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al Zawahri released tapes, the day before Obama’s Cairo address, warning Muslims that Obama was just another Muslim-hating US president like George Bush. In Israel, a lawmaker from the rightwing National Union Party raged that Obama had compared “Arab refugee suffering to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.” In Gaza, the Hamas’ deputy foreign minister couldn’t believe that Obama had “point[ed] to the right of Israel to exist, but what about the refugees and their right of return?”
And so on.
(And yet that same Hamas official added a startling clause to another remark: “[Obama] should know people are under occupation and cannot recognize the state while they are under occupation, only afterwards’ (emphasis added) – a two-word clause tantamount to a promise, which however not a single American commentator, to this columnist’s knowledge, picked up.)
Strategically, Obama sought to reassure and embrace the world’s billion-plus ‘mainstream’ Muslims, while quarantining them off from the tiny minority of “violent extremists.” (Obama never used the word ‘terrorists,’ widely understood by Muslims to mean all Muslims, after eight years of opportunistic attacks and warmongering rhetoric by the Bush administration. He also made much of America’s own African-American Muslims, citing the achievements of both Malcolm X and Muhammed Ali, though he called neither by name, and though again the US media missed the references – which is perhaps just as well.)
Tactically, Obama also committed himself to the bold gamble of putting everything on the table, and talking plainly. “I am convinced,” he said, “that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors… That is what I will try to do.”
More tangibly, he drew a line in the sand over the matter of Israeli settlements: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
No serious observer of Obama (and one excludes those hardcore leftwing ideologues already embittered by this or that Obama policy) can have doubted that his heart was with the oppressed Palestinians all along. But on Thursday he publicly invested his presidency in the two-state solution and the cessation of Israeli settlements, both anathema to Israel’s current hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
For the first time since the Carter ’70s, therefore, America and Israel are publicly on a collision course. And if Netanyahu doesn’t blink (because, after Thursday, Obama can’t), this stand-off could have explosive consequences if and when Israel sets out to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, as most experts think it will some time in the first half of 2010.
But Obama’s Cairo address was earth-shaking, finally, not for any of its concrete proposals (there were few) but for the dramatic signal it sent of a new America abroad in the world. Many would say that, after the large-scale hatred and murder unleashed by Bush-Cheney, such a signal needed to be sent.
But Obama’s speech went further than that. It seemed to express ‘our’ America.
As Friday’s NYT editorialized: “When President Bush spoke in the months and years after Sept. 11, 2001, we often — chillingly — felt as if we didn’t recognize the United States. His vision was of a country racked with fear and bent on vengeance, one that imposed invidious choices on the world and on itself. When we listened to President Obama speak in Cairo on Thursday, we recognized the United States.”
