Obama's deadly silence

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Barack Obama is presented with a t-shirt by Sderot mayor Eli Moyal as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (left) looks on after inspecting homemade Palestinian rockets during his visit to the southern Israeli town last year. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

"I would like to ask President-elect Obama to say something please about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced right now by the people of Gaza." Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney made her plea after disembarking from the badly damaged SS Dignity that had limped to the Lebanese port of Tyre while taking on water.

The small boat, carrying McKinney, the Green Party's recent presidential candidate, other volunteers, and several tons of donated medical supplies, had been trying to reach the coast of Gaza when it was rammed by an Israeli gunboat in international waters.

But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured -- the majority civilians -- since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.

The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more "complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as responsible statesmanship.

It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab parliament.

It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza.

But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza -- the besieged and blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them children and eighty percent refugees -- is the aggressor against whom no cruelty is apparently too extreme.

While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its citizens. Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its shelling [and] Israel responded."

The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian reported on 5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not leave the White House with George W. Bush on 20 January.

Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There, Obama declared: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration's.

Along with Tony Blair and George W. Bush, Obama staunchly supported Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people.

Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters." He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizballah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).

Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands -- thousands -- of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists."

The problem is much wider than Obama: American liberals in general see no contradiction in espousing positions supporting Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context. The cream of America's allegedly "progressive" Democratic party vanguard -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman, New York Senator Charles Schumer, among others -- have all offered unequivocal support for Israel's massacres in Gaza, describing them as "self-defense."

And then there's Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state and self-styled champion of women and the working classes, who won't let anyone outbid her anti-Palestinian positions.

Democrats are not simply indifferent to Palestinians. In the recent presidential election, their efforts to win swing states like Florida often involved espousing positions dehumanizing to Palestinians in particular and Arabs and Muslims in general. Many liberals know this is wrong but tolerate it silently as a price worth paying (though not to be paid by them) to see a Democrat in office.

Even those further to the left implicitly accept Israel's logic. Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, criticized Israel's attacks on Gaza as a "reckless" and "disproportionate response" to Hamas rocket attacks that he deemed "immoral." There are many others who do nothing to support nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonization, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions but who are quick to condemn any desperate Palestinian effort -- no matter how ineffectual and symbolic -- to resist Israel's relentless aggression.

Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions.

There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call: when it comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its neoconservative backers.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). This essay was first published in The Guardian's Comment is Free and is republished with the author's permission.

Obama is irt

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Gratula, gratula, Jungel Eddie!

Keep up the good work!
Csak az orultek es a latnokok merik kimondani az igazsagot!
Keep up the good work,
udv.,

Barack Hussein Obama
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8,000 Beduin stake their claim as the lost tribe of Barack Obama

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Fekete zsidó törzs Izraelben azt állítja, hogy Obama afrikai törzsével van rokonságban... Obama tulajdonképpen e törzs tagja...rokonok... Obama tribe...

A sheikh in Galilee says he has evidence that he and his family are linked by blood to the new President

James Hider in Bir al-Maksour

He has a host of relatives in exotic locations from Hawaii to Kenya, and during his run for the American presidency he discovered that he had an aunt living in Boston.

Now Barack Obama is being claimed by not one but as many as 8,000 Beduin tribesmen in northern Israel.

Although the spokesman for the lost tribe of Obama has yet to reveal the documentary evidence that he says he possesses to support his claim, people are flocking from across the region to pay their respects to the “Bedu Obama”, whose social standing has gone through the roof.

“We knew about it years ago but we were afraid to talk about it because we didn’t want to influence the election,” Abdul Rahman Sheikh Abdullah, a 53-year-old local council member, told The Times in the small Beduin village of Bir al-Maksour in the Israeli region of Galilee. “We wrote a letter to him explaining the family connection.”

Mr Obama’s team have not responded to the letter so far but that has not dampened Sheikh Abdullah’s festivities.

Watch the video!

He has been handing out sweets and huge dishes of baklava traditional honey-sweetened pastries to all and sundry, and plans to hold a large party next week at which he will slaughter a dozen goats to feed the village.

It was his 95-year-old mother who first spotted the connection, he says. Seeing the charismatic senator on television, she noted a striking resemblance to one of the African migrant workers who used to be employed by rich sheikhs in the fertile north of British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s.

The Africans would sometimes marry local Beduin girls and start families, though, like many migrant workers, would just as frequently return home after several years.

One of those men was a relative of Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, Sheikh Abdullah maintains.
He estimates that his tribe extends to as many as 8,000 members, all of them loosely connected to the African-American senator for Illinois.

Sheikh Abdullah swears that he has papers and pictures to back up his claim but has promised his mother not to divulge them until he has presented them to Mr Obama, something he hopes will happen once his “relative” is in the White House.

“We want to send a delegation to congratulate him, and we know we’ll get an answer soon,” he grinned.

Sheikh Abdullah’s renown as the relative of the soon-to-be most powerful man on Earth has spread like wildfire among the Arab community of northern Israel, and especially among Beduin, a formerly semi-nomadic group of pastoralists corralled into townships by the modern state of Israel.

Two baby boys born into the sheikh’s large clan have even been named Obama.

“We knew he’d win,” the sheikh said, constantly interrupted by a barrage of phone calls from wellwishers and those hoping to cash in on his newfound wasta, an Arabic term denoting influence or clout. “We have always been a lucky family.

“We hope he’ll end all wars and intervene here to solve our problems in Israel. The Beduin are the people who suffer the most here,” he added while greeting a wellwisher from Ghajar, an Arab town divided between Israel and southern Lebanon, the bitter legacy of the Jewish state’s long occupation of southern Lebanon.
“We hope to God that Obama will solve the problem of Ghajar,” said Sheikh Issam al-Khalil, a leading citizen of the divided town, whose residents mostly speak Hebrew and Arabic but many of whom consider themselves as originally Syrian.

“Everyone is talking about [Sheikh Abdullah’s ties to Mr Obama] . . . They believe it. The sheikhs from all the villages are talking about it. There’s a whole delegation of Druze leaders coming from the Golan Heights to congratulate him.”

The history of the Middle East is littered with the stories of false messiahs and their brief followings. For the time being, Sheikh Abdullah is greeting a dozen respectful visitors a day, basking in the reflected glory of what would be not only the first African-American US President but the first one who could claim kinship with an entire clan of Beduin.

All hail the massiah! All hail Obama!

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Előző írásomtól eltérően azt kell mondjam nap, mint nap egyre szkeptikusabb vagyok ezzel a "napbarnított" (sic!) fiatalemberrel kapcsolatban. Kampánya elején még totális felfüggesztéseket ígért az amerikai háborúkkal kapcsolatban, mostanra már óvatosabban fogalmaz és csak csapatleépítéseket pedzeget.
Nem szabad olyat mondani, hogy a "globalizációt irányító titkos megbízói kör", akik irányítják világunkat valamiért éppen jobb belátásra bírja Obamát, mert az összeesküvés-elmélet szagú lenne, de hát mire is következtessen az ember, ha nem lát a reakció mögötti akciót. Például arra, hogy eleve így "rendeltetett", tökéletes rendezésben zajlottak a választások. Ismervén az amerikát irányító lobbikat, ez a szerencsétlen sem lesz több, mint egy mezei báb, ami éppen "az amerikai álom megvalósulását" hivatott szimbolizálni és elterelni a figyelmet arról, hogy mi is zajlik a világban. De ez összeesküvés-elméletként hathat, ezért elhatárolódom magamtól...
Hányinger kerülget, mikor itthon élő, amerikában éppen csak egy reptéri csatlakozás erejéig megfordult magyarok "VEGYÜNK PÉLDÁT ERRŐL A NEMZETRŐL, HISZ AZOK OLY' ÖSSZETARTÓAK" címszóval kiáltanak dicshimnuszokat, majd könnyekkel küszködve merednek a jövőbe, amikor feltételezéseik szerint majd lelövik az új elnököt, hiszen Obama oly' bátor, harcias, elszánt reformer, hogy azt a gonosz náci, szélsőséges és rasszista világuralmi elit nem fogja tétlenül végignézni. Nem ezt hívják agymosottak paranoiájának?

Erős kritikai hangvételű, de nagyon szellemes videó Obamáról és az őt övező messianizmusról:

és még egy

és még egy

és még...

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Forrás: Ellenkultura