The real test of President Obama’s Cairo speech is not in the Arab or wider Muslim world.
Or Israel. It’s in America. This President, perhaps the most informed, the most eloquent and the most enlightened occupant of the White House in his country’s history (God Bless Americans for electing him), knows exactly what he’s got to do and how to do it. Above all, he knows that if he is to have a chance of obliging Israel to make peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, he’s got to break the Zionist lobby’s stranglehold on Congress (on matters relating to U.S. policy for the Middle East). And to do that, he also knows, he’s got to create a constituency of understanding in America. As I have put it in previous postings, he needs Americans, and Jewish Americans especially, to be empowered by knowledge of reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine to make their democracy work for justice for the Palestinians and peace for all.
In the context above, the single most important words President Obama spoke were about the Palestinians and their plight:
“They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt, the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”
All Arabs and other Muslims know that. As do almost all Europeans. The only people who don’t know are, generally speaking, the Americans, because they’ve been conditioned by the mainstream media and their pork-barrel politicians to accept without question Zionism’s version of history, a version which, as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, is one propaganda lie after another. President Obama was effectively saying to his fellow Americans, “It’s time for you to know the reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine and do some serious re-thinking.”
My Dear America Preface to the now published Volume One of the American edition of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, sub-titled The False Messiah, opens with these words:
If our children, wherever they live, are to have the prospect of a future worth having, the world needs your best, not what it had under the neo-conned regime of President George “Dubya” Bush, your worst.
In Cairo, President Obama seemed to be saying something very like that in his own words.
I go on to say that I know America well enough from coast-to-coast to have a good idea of what America’s best is. “Deep down you are the most idealistic people on earth. This suggests to me that if all of you were properly informed about why what is happening in the world is happening, in the Middle East especially, you would want to make your democracy work to cause your government to play its necessary leading role in stopping the countdown to catastrophe for all and changing the world for the better.”
I add my belief that if all Americans had been properly informed long ago about the cause and effect relationship of Israeli occupation and Palestinian violence, there would have been, long ago, pressure on Congress and the White House, for an end to Israeli occupation of all Arab land grabbed in the 1967 war.
Am I naïve for believing that the best of America can be liberated to assist President Obama to bring the longest running and most menacing conflict in all of human history to an end?
If I’m not, the answer to my headline question could be “No”.
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