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Thursday, June 04, 2009

State of independence.

Barack Obama's speech in Cairo today, billed almost as a state of the nation address, except to the "Muslim" world, was never going to live up to the hype accorded to it. The challenge itself was fairly daunting: how, after 8 years of suspicion, conspiracy theories and such mutual apparent loathing was the president of the United States meant to even attempt to lance the boil?

The predictable answer was to shower love, tolerance and moral equivalence liberally all over those who deigned to listen. Obama quotes repeatedly from the "Holy Koran", which is unlikely to do much to win over those in the States that continue to accuse him of being little more than a Manchurian Muslim, and equally will do little to appease the hardliners that will take such quoting itself as an insult. He repeatedly broaches respect for the hijab, although he apparently mispronounced it Human rights are barely mentioned, as could have been expected from someone who has just visited Saudi Arabia and still praises their interfaith "dialogue", as well as while speaking from the capital of a nation where the president has ruled since 1981 without anything approaching democratic legitimation. Behind the warm words, there was very little that can be called substance, but that hardly seems to have been the modus operandi: this was meant instead to restart relations, and if you judge it on those grounds alone there's little to take too much offence from or to quibble with.

The only section that may well stand the test of time was also the most important, and if there was any doubt that Obama does mean what he says when it comes to Israel/Palestine, then the strength of his words and the equivocation between both Jewish and Palestinian suffering will surely concentrate minds:

The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.

America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. 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. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them - and all of us - to live up to our responsibilities.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. Palestine's right to exist cannot be denied. The settlements have to stop. No recent president has put it both so simply and so powerfully. These things ought to be platitudes; everyone realises that all three of these things are facts, yet to make them so perfectly clear has been to invite brickbats from those who wish to either completely deny or slow to a standstill the movement towards an independent Palestinian state. Again, none of this is an actual change in US policy, but the Bush administration did little more than pay lip service to the idea that growth of settlements in the West Bank had to cease, and the outrage and dissent with which Israel has greeted Obama forcing the issue has shown the fear which the Israeli government has for the potential pressure which the US can bring to bear.

Some will sneer at Obama's last paragraph on I/P (below), especially its pie in the sky hope for religious unity in Jerusalem and wonder whether he truly will put his words into action, but he has clearly put his position forward, and he can now be held accountable for it. Too much hope has already been put in Obama's potential for real change, but to finally make the case for a Palestinian state's right to exist as forcefully as Israel's itself is as fine a position to start from as could have been expected.

America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true. Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

Labels: Barack Obama, human rights, Israel, Israel-Palestine, US politics

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6/04/2009 10:03:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, September 01, 2008

All virgins are liars honey.

I haven't blogged much about the incessant background chorus which is the US presidential election mainly because I'm probably one of the few political creatures that isn't fascinated by the whole thing. The Democratic convention last week didn't help matters: it takes something to make our political parties' soirées at the seaside look meaningful and not like an exercise in navel gazing which both the politicos and the journalists spend getting lashed, but last week's convention and its screechingly mawkish sentimentality, which featured Obama's daughters on the stage talking to Daddy whilst he was elsewhere, the Hillary and Bill show where the least likable couple in political history failed culpably to get over their sour grapes at losing, and then Obama making a thunderously overrated speech, like all the rest, surrounded by a Roman-Greco backdrop which the Republicans themselves couldn't have constructed if they'd wanted him to look like a pseud, succeeded admirably.

All this was meant to have set-up McCain for what would have been a fight-back; instead what we've seen has been natural disaster and, well, human disaster. You can't plan for events like Gustav disrupting your enthronement, but McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate must in the pantheon of political choices go down as one of the worst of all time, without hyperbole, although who knows, come November I may be eating my words. This was a shockingly cynical but also shallow choice, at a stroke rendering the Republican attack on Obama as inexperienced dead in the water. If this was a further sop for the PUMAs, then it was one based on a flawed idea of what the average Hillary supporting Democrat was after: Palin doesn't just oppose abortion, but also opposes it for rape and incest victims. She has thanks to her reputation as an evangelical, NRA-supporting, global warming sceptic appealed to the Republican Christian conservative base, but on every other ground she comes up short.

To be completely juvenile and dwell on irrelevancy for a paragraph, that includes on naming her children. I mean seriously, Bristol, Track, Trig, Willow and Piper? We expect celebrities to call their children stupid, pretentious things, whether it be Peaches, Pixie, Apple, Shiloh, Romeo, Brooklyn and all the other assorted nightmares, but politicians generally have slightly more sense. Except for David Cameron, of course, but then he fits the profile alluded to. Bristol is apparently named after Bristol Bay in Alaska, which I am reliably informed by someone who used to live 12 miles from where Palin was formerly mayor is a huge salmon processing place which always smells like death, but Wikipedia informs us that it was named by James Cook in honour of the Admiral Earl of Bristol, so it takes its name from our own delightful city. Anton Vowl alludes to where next if Palin was to have any more children she could take influence from - Swindon, Bradford, Middlesbrough, to which I can only add that I don't think anyone has yet thought of calling their offspring Scunthorpe, Cockermouth (which is actually a rather lovely little town) or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

The issue that has emerged has however not been Palin herself having any more children, but that of her daughter, the aforementioned Bristol who it has been revealed is 5 months pregnant. Whether this was released because certain left-wing blogs in the US were scurrilously and completely erroneously alleging that Bristol had in fact given birth to Palin's last child, Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome, is unclear, but it has nonetheless rather energised comment as only something resembling a scandal involving a politician can.

This shouldn't as some have already argued be either something to score points over or to even mention for fear that it will be seen, quite plausibly, as the lowest form of politics. The facts however do speak for themselves: Palin is an opponent of "explicit" sex education and has supported abstinence only education in its place. After all, if a politician's own daughter's experience appears to suggest that abstinence only education doesn't work, isn't that something that ought to be highlighted? Plausibly, but it will still be seen as it ought to be of bringing family into something that most will highly sympathise with; after all, we all make mistakes and this is one that Palin's daughter most likely bitterly regrets. There might be more in it if Palin additionally opposed contraception, but she doesn't. Probably the best case I've seen for it to be any sort of issue is made by innerbrat.

More pertinently I think that the real issue here, away from the fact that Palin doesn't seem to have been properly vetted by McCain's people, further suggesting that she was on-the-cuff choice designed to also pull some of the attention away from Obama's speech, is that it's been swiftly announced that Bristol will also be marrying the father of the child. Considering that she's already 5 months pregnant and there doesn't seem to have been any sign at all that there was to be a marriage prior to Palin's swift ascension to being McCain's number two, this seems to be even more cynical than our own Tessa Jowell's swift separation from her husband after the mortgage debacle. Quite aside from whether this is her daughter's own wishes and whether getting married at 17 is even anything resembling a good idea, it also rather exposes Palin's opposition to same-sex marriage, which she detests to such an extent that she supported a constitutional amendment which would have denied state health benefits to same-sex couples. The familiar argument against it is that it debases marriage and the sanctity of the institution; what more actually offends the institution than shotgun weddings in this day and age, either to appease a Christian conservative base or to spare a vice-presidential candidate's potential blushes?

Now, it might possibly be that her daughter fully intended to marry the father, and that theirs is a loving and committed relationship. Maybe I'm just being too cynical over potential cynicism, or then again, maybe I'm being realistic about the sort of relationships which most 17-year-olds have. In any case, Obama's campaign has quite rightly said that it won't be so much as mentioning it again. That doesn't matter though: already both left and right are squabbling online as only they can. The real question is exactly what those who previously hailed Palin as their sort of person based on her beliefs really think when they're not required to mind their language. As Michael Tomasky points out, Karl Rove thought that the revelation about Bush's DUI cost him three or four points with evangelical voters. We all know that such rigidity of dogma can only result in inevitable hypocrisy, but those self-same conservative warriors might not think too highly of her mother's skills as a parent, and that might just be enough to put the nail in the coffin of McCain's gamble.

Labels: John McCain, Republicans, Sarah Palin, stupid names, US politics, US presidential candidates, US presidential election