Oscar for Obama
By Israel
Shamir
Obama’s
Cairo speech was a thing of great beauty. It had the best production, best
actor, best script we have seen for many years, it
deserves the Oscar of Oscars. America’s ruling elites have pulled up their
socks and gotten their country the best leader to improve the rundown image.
Obama is a next-generation model of a leader, not yet available abroad. He
is a great speaker, full of charisma, tall, slim, youthful. He proved: yes,
they can.
Our friend and former US presidential candidate Cynthia
McKinney explained Obama phenomenon: “things don't happen like that in US
politics, probably in politics any where in the world, where a veritable
unknown ascends to the Senate unopposed and then is a candidate for the
White House two years later. It just doesn't happen that way. Unless
it is by design.”
Apparently Obama was designed to
make peace with the Muslim world. A US
president is not an omnipotent ruler: he is rather an actor chosen by the
off-scene producer and director to act this important role. He does not
write his speeches any more than Leonardo DiCaprio
wrote the Romeo monologue. He does not make his politics, either. That is
why his words and deeds are important: they represent the ruling elites’
will to change. This change is necessarily slow, as the huge dreadnought
America can’t just be turned around on the spot.
At this time of change, of
shifting priorities it is notoriously difficult to predict developments for
they depend on us as well. The world needs more inward-looking America, but
even a less aggressive one would be a step forward. Looking back, American
hostility towards the Islamic world flared in 2001, peaked in 2003, had run
its course and seems to be over. These years of war against Islam weren’t
specially pleasant or profitable for America. Now the moment has come to
shift priorities. The Kite Runner,
a bestseller by Khaled
Hosseini, offered a new scheme of things – the protagonist of the
novel is a Muslim by birth and tradition, who hates Muslim clergy, likes
whisky, loves America and Israel and hates Russia. The bad guy loves Hitler,
is a pedophile and rapist, and yes, he is a Taliban militant. Persecution of
an ethnic minority is a local equivalent of Jewish story. This book offers
the integration of such non-religious Muslims into the American narrative.
Well, why not? The US is a
political, not ethnic nation, and Muslims can be admitted and they often
are. Though non-Americans often imagine American elites consisting of WASPs
and Jews, there are people of all sorts, immigrants from all countries. This
is a source of power: America can easily find a Russian to speak with
Russians, or a Chinese to speak to China. Muslims are doing well in
America, some of them are extremely wealthy.
This turn means downgrading for
the Israeli Lobby. The Jewish Zionist right-wing has abused American
patience for too long. It just so happens that they overestimated their hold
on this administration. The removal of
Charles Freeman was their last, Pyrrhic victory. The arrival of
starry-eyed Netanyahu preaching Amalek was a
next step in their undoing. “Amalek”
is a code-word for a call to genocide, shorthand for asking Obama to
slaughter Iranians down to the last child and the last cat. That was too
much even for the patient Obama.
Thus, a dream came true: after a
long rule by the Jewish Centre-Right, now the positions of influence have
passed into the able hands of the Jewish Left. Do not think that their
positions are anti-Israeli. Yes, Israeli and American Jewish right
hates Obama; but Israeli left loved the speech: it could have been
written by Yossi Sarid
or by Uri Avnery. J-Street, a Jewish American
leftist lobby organization also loved it.
It should not come as any great
surprise. In an
interview given to the Jewish newspaper a year ago, Obama mentioned
The Yellow Wind by David
Grossman as a book that influenced his view. This is a wonderful book,
probably the best non-fiction by a Hebrew writer about the state of things,
describing the horrors of settler rule in the occupied territories. Grossman
is a Zionist Left icon, creator of the left wing of the leftist
Meretz party. The divergence of America and
Israel, the great and the small Jewish states, is now a fact:
Barak Obama and his administration are
positioned to the left of centre, while Israel and its supporters in the US
are well to the right of centre.
A few years ago, Ariel Sharon,
then the Prime Minister of Israel, allegedly said that the Jewish People
control America. After the last elections, the new Foreign Minister of
Israel, Avigdor Lieberman interpreted this maxim
as “Israel controls America”. He was over-optimistic and over-simplistic.
Maybe the US Jews occupy many positions of power, maybe they care a lot
about the Middle-Eastern Jewish state, but they still have their priorities
straight: America is more important, and they do not intend to lose it
because of their cousins overseas.
In 2001, I’ve
compared the US Jews with the elder
sister in Raymond Chandler's Big Sleep, who covers up the crimes of her wild
kid sister. Probably you remember it as one of the best American movies of
all times, scripted by William Faulkner, directed by Howard Hawks, starring
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. As the cover
up continues, the young sister comes to believe that she has immunity and
keeps on her killing spree. Eventually her crimes endanger the seemingly
secure position of the elder sister. It is not a day too early for misguided
Lauren to call for Bogart and to rein in the crazed
youth , before she will bring the house down on the heads of her
blind supporters, I wrote. Eight years later, comes
Bogart Obama.
Do not expect that American Jews
will weep and run to Israel. The Jewish position in the US remains strong,
and Obama reiterated their Zionist-lite
narrative: after the Holocaust of six million Jews, (and don’t you
ever dare to doubt it!) the
long-suffering Jewish people came to the land of their ancestors, and
America’s ties with them are “unbreakable”. However, the right-wing Jewish
Lobby, or “American Likudniks” as they were
called, suffered a defeat. Now we can say that Bernie
Madoff’s undoing was not an accident but a direct attack on their
ability to influence politics: many right-wing Jewish individuals and
organisations have lost their surplus meddling
money.
A warning shot across the bow was
fired a few days ago, when a survivor of Israeli 1967 attack on the USS
Liberty was awarded a Silver Star for valour, as
we have
reported. The mainstream US media (mainly Jewish-owned and edited)
intentionally omitted this news, as Google search of “silver star
Halbardier” shows. A careful reader could find
it on a
US military info site and that was it. The average American reader or
TV viewer was deprived of this news, though oh boy, was it newsworthy: after
forty two years of denial, the US top brass admitted that its best ally
Israel intentionally and knowingly attacked their intelligence ship with
torpedoes and strafing aircraft, killing and wounding two thirds of the
crew, while president Lyndon B. Johnson covered up the massacre and let it
be.
This media silence was as
important as the news: it served as a warning that the administration has to
act in agreement with media lords; otherwise its deeds will never reach the
American people. Despite his blog and informal
contacts with hundreds of thousands Americans, Obama has no means to speak
effectively to his citizens but via the media. And right-wing media can be
cruel enemy, as
this piece from NYPost attests.
Many friends of Palestine,
including
Noam Chomsky, found fault in the Cairo speech. Surely Obama did not go
as far as we would like. His supporters are Zionists-lite,
not some indifferent gentiles. Still wonderful that he went that far. He
promised to remove his troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, to rebuild
Afghanistan, to spend some money on development. He confirmed that Iran has
the right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. He called upon Israel
to deal with Palestinians justly. Let him survive this speech and continue
to push on. Yes, Obama is carefully designed and promoted by the elites, but
it does not mean he has no free will. Many kings and leaders were elected
thanks to Jewish money or influence, and changed their attitude afterwards.
Joseph Stalin became a Soviet leader thanks to Kamenev
and Zinoviev, two powerful Bolshevik Jews, but
some years later he had them shot, and the Soviet Jewish Lobby was taken a
few pegs down. This still can happen with Barak
Obama.