Summer 2009 Feature
President Obama’s Cairo Speech and the Reset Button
by Darren Pinsker
President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo in June may come to be viewed as the foundation stone in his Administration’s attempt to hit the “reset button” with the Muslim world. It was delivered with Obama’s now trademark smoothness. On the surface, the Cairo speech contained much to be praised: a call for comity between the United States and the Muslim world; a mention of the “unbreakable” bond between Israel and the United States; a recitation of some of the rich achievements of Islamic civilization; a call for the Muslim world to acknowledge the Holocaust; a reminder that al Qaeda committed 9/11 (the unspoken subtext being that the atrocity was not executed by the CIA or Israeli intelligence, contrary to the delusional table-talk standard in Middle Eastern coffee houses); a reminder that blowing up buses—and the commuters that ride in them—is morally wrong (a point that one would hope listeners could have intuited without external guidance); and a personal note sounded by Obama in his discussion of his genealogy and upbringing in Indonesia, meant to convey cross-border connectedness and understanding
Obama’s putative goal was to set a warmer tone for future American dialogue and interaction with the Muslim world, a goal that would, in a vacuum, seem acceptable to most Americans. But depressing the reset button for one group must always entail reordering relations with another group, logically in a contrary direction. There are winners, and there are losers. When Hillary Clinton offered the Russians a button labeled with the word “reset” (albeit mistranslated) in a gesture the Administration must have somehow thought cute (as if Putin & company can be made more malleable by coquettish behavior), East European nations could be excused for feeling concerned. Presumably it was not the grammatical gaffe in a sister Slavic language that exercised the Czechs, Poles, or Ukranians.
Should Americans who are concerned with the security of Israel likewise begin to worry that Israel is being demoted to a lower rung on the ladder of U.S. interests, sacrificed to the goal of forging better relations with the Muslim world? A close read of the Cairo speech, coupled with other signals broadcast by the Administration, indeed points in that direction.
Begin first with the symbolic nature of the trip itself. Cairo was a sensible venue for the speech. Egypt sits in the heart of the Arab world. It is considered a friend of the United States. It is the Arab world’s most populous and, arguably, most influential country.
It also sits adjacent to Israel, and one way to reset relations is to realign the compass and bypass Israel, whether one travels to Egypt, or to Turkey as Obama did earlier in the year without making a neighborly stopover in Tel Aviv. Another means of resetting the order of things is to link U.S. cooperation on the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon to Israeli concessions on the Israeli-Palestinian front, as Rahm Emmanuel, Clinton, and Obama have done in recent weeks, vehemently advocating a proposition whose logic strains credulity. Or the State Department can float the idea of compelling Israel to sign onto the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as it recently did, coarsely implying equivalence with Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and raising the specter of a weakening of Israel’s deterrent posture.
In isolation, each of these actions might appear to be an aberrational deviation from prior U.S. policy; taken together, they constitute the unwritten preamble to the Cairo speech, in toto marking a significant departure from the Bush Administration’s highly supportive approach towards Israel.
It is unquestionably a challenge to speak to a community of over 1 billion souls in an effort to break down barriers and simultaneously offer criticism of that community, a nearly schizophrenic task, one whose two opposing goals are difficult to reconcile. Either the hard truth is told in its entirety, inevitably giving insult, or truth is sacrificed, with partial truths put forth instead, to avoid stoking resentment. Obama had to walk a fine line, and he chose to tell partial truths. These were expressed through the generous use of moral relativism; soft supplication; and ahistorical verbal juxtapositions. This should cause unease to friends of Israel.
Early in the speech, Obama brought to bear the traditional Third World trope of colonialism. In discussing the historical relationship between the West and Islam, Obama opined:
More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims and a Cold War in which Muslim majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.
While colonialism has undeniably left its stamp on parts of the Muslim world, its effects have not all been deleterious, and it is certainly a weak explanatory factor for the dysfunction plaguing large swaths of the Muslim world. The mantra of colonialism is too often used by corrupt regimes as a convenient excuse for their internal rot. An American president should not give credence to that argument, even an American president who seeks to placate the Muslim world. The Western powers were colonialists in the Middle East for a rather short period, and the United States hardly qualifies at all for that title. By contrast, the Ottoman Turks served as colonial masters, and for a far longer period than did the British or French. And most importantly, the history of the spread of Islam is itself the history of an imperial movement. (How else did Islam radiate out from present day Saudi Arabia to encompass the vast reaches of the Muslim world today, if not partly through conquest?)
Obama, in formulating his foreign policy, would be better served by Princeton professor Bernard Lewis’s cogent argument that the contemporary convulsions within the world of Islam, so dismayingly expressed in mayhem and violence against innocent Muslims and Westerners, stem from the frustrated desire to recapture the Islamic golden age. But, admittedly, that would not have been a popular message to broadcast from Cairo. Speaking truth has its limits.
Obama later took on the broad concept of cooperation and differences in the speech.
So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.
Nice words, these, but they elide the crucial point that our differences are in some instances fundamental. If the United States is to stand for certain core, defining ideals, these differences will inevitably be a cause of tension. That is not to say that differences over democracy and women’s rights and rampant antisemitism, for example, must serve as a precursor to perpetual conflict, but neither should an American president pretend that these are trivial points.
Obama also took up the cudgels against Islamophobia.
And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.
One would not be intolerant to ask the following questions: Is the negative stereotyping of Muslims an epidemic that engenders life-and-death consequences—as is the negative stereotyping of Israelis, non-Israeli Jews, and Westerners? Is Obama unintentionally perpetuating the canard that Islamophobia truly threatens the world’s Muslims?
To his credit, Obama also admonished the Muslim world to fight negative stereotyping of America, declaring, “But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America.” Nonetheless, it should be evident that there is a false analogy at play here. Muslims need not fear being blown up by Western Islamophobes. If so, where is the Western equivalent of al Qaeda? Negative stereotyping of Muslims is today anathema in the United States. By contrast, the negative stereotyping of Americans, Jews, and Westerners that pervades the Muslim world has deadly consequences.
To his credit, Obama asserted “The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known.” He could also have added, for the sake of propounding truth, that the United States has been a great force for progress for Muslims in particular, as Americans have died to better the lives of Bosnians, Kuwaitis, Somalis, Kosovans, Iraqis, and Afghanis.
Stylistically, much of the speech took the form of an ‘on the one hand…on the other hand’ dialectic, that seemed to place the actions of both sides, whether America (on the one hand) and the Muslim world (on the other hand), or Israel (on the one hand) and the Palestinians (on the other hand), subtly on an equally morally censorious footing. And this is problematic, to say the least. For example:
9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.
To compare the violation of basic morality that was 9/11 with Guantanamo Bay and the waterboarding of three terrorist leaders in order to save American lives hints at a disturbing moral relativism. This relativism permeated other sections of the speech, in particular the discussion of Israel and the Palestinians. On this central topic, Obama began nobly with a recitation of the trauma to the Jewish people of the Holocaust and a strong condemnation of Holocaust denial, which is rampant in the Muslim world. But he then veered into the two-handed dialectic.
Six million Jews were killed—more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is 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.
Yes, it is undeniable that the Palestinians have suffered (most often, it should be added, at the hands of their own leaders). One need not expect Obama to have entered into the question of whether that suffering would have occurred absent the Arab attempt to eradicate Israel in 1947-49. A speech in Cairo broadcast to the Muslim world was not the appropriate venue for a recapitulation of that history. But the juxtaposition of the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering is jarring. And it plays into the false narrative that the Palestinians suffered for the crimes of the Europeans. The narrative is false because the Jewish claim to a homeland does not stem from the Holocaust. The modern Jewish national movement did not begin in 1939; it began sixty years earlier, and itself was built on the Jews’ ancient claim to Israel, a claim that is widely denied by Palestinians.
Little by little, a picture of Obama’s worldview begins to coalesce as the speech progresses. One begins to see how Obama views the protagonists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he compares the suffering of the Palestinians to that of black slaves in America and to African Americans denied their civil rights in the Jim Crow South, a comparison that puts Israel in a very unenviable light.
Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it 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.
Finally, in addressing directly the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Obama reminded Israelis to
…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.
Obama reiterated here the greatest fallacy of the conflict, that the settlements in the West Bank are a central impediment to peace. The settlements are indeed an irritant, but their absence, where they have been uprooted, has done nothing to end the Palestinian assault on Israel (as the complete withdrawal from Gaza has shown). Were Obama to speak the hard truth, he would have explained that the Arab refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is the greatest impediment to peace. It is too easily forgotten that Israel offered the Palestinians a state on 95% of the West Bank and Gaza in the year 2000. If Obama’s goal is to assist the parties in settling the conflict, he should have said that the Palestinian attempt to swamp Israel demographically through the “right of return” is tantamount to a refusal to acknowledge the existence of Israel, and that the United States only supports the resettlement of refugees and descendants of refugees within the borders of a Palestinian state, not within Israel. Only when that is accepted by Palestinian society and by the broader Muslim world will a peace process yield anything more than process followed by continued conflict.
The Obama administration seeks to reduce the discord between the U.S. and the Muslim world, and its chosen tools for realization of that goal are rhetorical outreach combined with an engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that will undoubtedly entail greater American pressure on Israel and a diminution in the intimacy of the historically close U.S. – Israel relationship.
The reset button has been pressed. That much should be apparent to friends of Israel. •
About the author
Darren Pinsker is a corporate finance consultant and writer living in New Jersey. He was an investment banker for 15 years and has lived and worked in Israel, Russia, Turkey, and the UK. His writing has been published by The Jerusalem Post and Business America.