A disappointing speech
Rime Allaf, June 4, 2009
President Obama addressing the Muslim world at Cairo University, June 4 2009.
The chorus of self-congratulatory and mutually satisfied remarks is already growing loud across the Atlantic, but the essence of Barack Obama’s promised truth-telling speech has been less than historic and rather selective.
Even if we were able to contain “the Muslim world” into specific cultural, social or geographical parameters, it is unlikely that President Obama’s intended audience was swept off its feet. Charismatic and eloquent on his own merit, and certainly in comparison to his predecessor, President Obama has yet to veer very far from the policy path taken by the Bush administration.
Granted, President Obama had a delicate task in trying to satisfy contrasting audiences: friendly regimes, including his hosts, were reassured that democracy would not be imposed, but the masses were given small consolations with reminders on human rights. Presidents of superpowers, however, should not expect praise for stating the obvious, for recounting historical anecdotes or for paying respect to the world’s big religions; Islam’s tremendous contributions to Western thought and development are not a matter of opinion, and quotations from its holy book, the Quran, are unimpressive.
Unfortunately, the double standards of American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, have remained at the crux of official rhetoric. Many will have heard a patronizing address, with an American president preaching, again, about what they must do and about the facts they must accept. The reference to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, for example, would have resonated more strongly had President Obama dared to speak of Israel’s extensive nuclear arsenal. Remorse about Iraq, instead of dubious claims of achievement there, would have earned him some credibility.
In the Arab world, there was much hope that the carte blanche the Bush administration had given Israel would be withdrawn. While President Obama does speak of the generic suffering of Palestinians, he does it without committing to anything not already approved by his predecessor and merely reiterated his demand that Palestinians alone (and not Israel) renounce violence. He speaks of a Palestinian state, but not of U.N. resolutions defining its basic formation, nor of the central issue of Palestinian refugees and their right of return, granted by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In effect, the only real problem Barack Obama seems to have with Israel is that of “continued settlements” and not actual occupation or dispossession. Even the Arab Peace Initiative was deemed insufficient, and he admonished Arabs for their “self-defeating focus on the past” without offering a comprehensive solution.
It is especially from Damascus that disappointment will be felt by those who expected differently. The long-awaited outreach to Syria would have been a perfect component of the speech, and a lucid demonstration of the U.S. president’s promised change. As a key party in the Arab-Israeli conflict, its Golan still occupied by Israel, the half a million Palestinian refugees and two million Iraqi refugees crowded within its borders, Syria surely should have been part of President Obama’s new beginning.
It’s a pity Barack Obama didn’t truly make a historical break with past American foreign policy while the entire Arab and Muslim world was listening, and willing to reciprocate.
Rime Allaf is a Syrian writer, an international consultant and an associate fellow at Chatham House in London. She has her own blog.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/what-obama-said-what-the-mideast-heard/
