Least credible to any Muslim would have been the “balanced” passages about Israel and Palestine and the measured calls to Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza to disdain violence and swap formal recognition of Israel for … for what? Pledges by the Netanyahu government to build more settlements?
“Among some Muslims,” Obama declared, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld…Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.” This came at the end of a week in which, as Uri Avnery detailed on this site this week the Israeli Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish state.
The private member’s bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the “Jewish Home” party, stipulates one year in prison to anyone who publishes “a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State”. “One can foresee the next steps,” Avnery wrote. “A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders.”
The bill now goes to the Legal Committee of the Knesset. Avnery says that within a few weeks or months it will be the law of the land.
The bill, Avnery notes, does not single out Arabs explicitly – “even if this is its clear intention, and all those who voted for it understood this. It also prohibits Jews from advocating a change in the state’s definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas.” Avnery concludes, “One can only imagine what would happen in the US if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.”
There are fine words. There are facts on the ground, and they often strayed far from each other in Obama’s big speech. One 1000-pound bomb or remote-controlled drone trumps 10,000 words on rhetoric about peace.
For his next address on this theme let me offer a very inspiring illustration of inter-confessional tolerance at work in a great cause. Around 930 AD the dowager Queen Toda of Navarre, a Christian, appealed to the caliphate in Cordoba, beseeching ‘Abd al-Rahman III to help her slim down her son Sancho I, who had been abandoned by his subjects in Navarre because he was too fat to ride a horse and thus unable to display himself properly as a kingly warrior. The caliph sent word he had this terrific Jewish doctor and promptly dispatched to Navarre his top court physician, a Jew called Hasday b Shaprut. The Shaprut Diet did the trick. A year later Sancho was back on the throne. E pluribus unum; i.e., out of many, many pounds emerged one thinned down Sancho. A Christian, a Muslim and a Jew, working together. But that was a thousand years ago and the reconquista of Al-Andalus was already under way, with the Crusades waiting in the wings.
The Muslim world no doubt thinks that in the broadest sense, Obama’s speech was a laudable effort. On this site this weekend, Franklin Lamb has a very funny account of a bunch of heavily armed gunmen in the Bekaa Valley shouting “Qwess! Qwess!” (Good, good).
Back in the USA there are many Christians and Jews shouting “Bad! Bad!” This most certainly spells trouble for Obama. On September 12, 1991, in the third year of his presidency, George Bush Sr publicly denounced the Israel lobby, which was storming around the halls of Congress with the intent of forcing through loan guarantees for Israel. The Bush administration was holding up the guarantees in an effort to induce Israel’s Shamir government to stop planting illegal settlements. Bush went on television and said he was “up against some powerful political forces. I heard today there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”
There’s a good case for saying that with those words Bush Sr signed the death warrant for his re-election. True, he had Ross Perot winning 19 per cent of the vote. But he also lost the Jewish vote and his son never forgot it. I’d guess that much earlier in his presidency Obama is on his way to losing it too. The guy must know what he’s doing, and if he doesn’t, there’s always Rahm Emanuel at his elbow to remind him. (Posted by Bulatlat.com)
Reading through most of the American websites and comments, unfortunately, Obama's message will not be understood in his time because he doesn't belong to this time. A time when most of the American politicians as well as normal people only speak and deadly believe in the submissive language of power and twisted muscles inherited form era of former Bush administration. 1000s of friends are better then 1 enemy, Obama now speaking in a language of reconciliation to the suspicious Muslim and Arab world. Through that language Obama can make America more protected, safe and economy can quickly rise up again in a very short time for the language of friendship can build as the wary language can destroy.