var articleheadline = "Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on
Gaza...";
Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...
Thursday, 22 January 2009
It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what
everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US
withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning
of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George
Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was the least that was expected. Of
course, Obama did refer to "slaughtered innocents", but these were not
quite the "slaughtered innocents" the Arabs had in mind.
There
was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks he's
the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps
Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only
kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the
"full partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full"
means. And it was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the
obligatory call to the Israelis. But for the people of the
Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" – indeed, the word "Israel"
as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he
care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise
that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not
have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab
minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago
but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It
wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer
amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop. Sure,
it's easy to be cynical. Arab rhetoric has something in common with
Obama's clichés: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play ...
loyalty and patriotism". But however much distance the new President
put between himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still
hung like a cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's
courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the
"our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and
hatred" was pure Bush; the one reference to "terror", the old Bush and
Israeli fear word, was a worrying sign that the new White House still
hasn't got the message. Hence we had Obama, apparently talking about
Islamist groups such as the Taliban who were "slaughtering innocents"
but who "cannot outlast us". As for those in the speech who are corrupt
and who "silence dissent", presumably intended to be the Iranian
government, most Arabs would associate this habit with President Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call from Obama
yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other autocrats
and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the
Middle East. Hanan Ashrawi got it right. The changes in the
Middle East – justice for the Palestinians, security for the
Palestinians as well as for the Israelis, an end to the illegal
building of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, an end to
all violence, not just the Arab variety – had to be "immediate" she
said, at once. But if the gentle George Mitchell's appointment was
meant to answer this demand, the inaugural speech, a real "B-minus" in
the Middle East, did not.The friendly message to Muslims, "a new
way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did
not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has
been staring in outrage. Yes, the Arabs and many other Muslim nations,
and, of course, most of the world, can rejoice that the awful Bush has
gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's torturers and Rumsfeld's
torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job where they don't
have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming? Sure,
give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas – he's
just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross
have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary
Clinton? More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians
in Damascus spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and
Israel. So hot to touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day,
Obama wasn't even wearing gloves.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-so-far-obamas-missed-the-point-on-gaza-1488632.html
