[Marxism] Uri Avnery on Cairo speech: One man spoke to the world, and the world listened.

["Lueko Willms" <lueko.willms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Permanent home here: 
> <http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1244289868/>

   While I think that Avnery is taken in by illusions, this article
at least is a reflection of the power of Obama's Cairo speech. 

   For your information, here the full text:

---------- full text ---------------------------------

The Tone and the Music
by Uri Avnery 

06/06/09


WHILE OBAMA proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is
returning to the 19th.


ONE MAN spoke to the world, and the world listened.

He walked onto the stage in Cairo, alone, without hosts and without
aides, and delivered a sermon to an audience of billions. Egyptians
and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, Sunnis and
Shiites, Copts and Maronites -- and they all listened attentively.

He unfolded before them the map of a new world, a different world,
whose values and laws he spelled out in simple and clear language - a
mixture of idealism and practical politics, vision and pragmatism.

Barack Hussein Obama -- as he took pains to call himself -- is the
most powerful man on earth. Every word he utters is a political fact.

"A HISTORIC SPEECH", pronounced commentators in a hundred languages.
I prefer another adjective:

The speech was right.

Every word was in its place, every sentence precise, every tone in
harmony. The masterpiece of a man bringing a new message to the
world.

>From the very first word, every listener in the hall and in the world
felt the honesty of the man, that his heart and his tongue were in
harmony, that this is not a politician of the old familiar sort ?
hypocritical, sanctimonious, calculating. His body language was
speaking, and so were his facial expressions

That's why the speech was so important. The new moral integrity and
the sense of honesty increased the impact of the revolutionary
content.


AND A REVOLUTIONARY speech it certainly was.

In 55 minutes, it not only wiped away the eight years of George W.
Bush, but also much of the preceding decades, from World War II on.

The American ship has turned -- not with the sluggishness everyone
would have expected, but with the agility of a speedboat.

That is much more than a political change. It touches the roots of
the American national consciousness. The President spoke to hundreds
of million US citizens no less than to a billion Muslims.

The American culture is based on the myth of the Wild West, with its
Good Guys and Bad Guys, violent justice, dueling under the midday
sun. Since the American nation is composed of immigrants from all
over the world, its unity seems to require a threatening,
world-encompassing evil enemy, like the Nazis and the Japs, or the
Commies. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, this role was taken
over by Islam.

Cruel, fanatical, bloodthirsty Islam; Islam as the religion of murder
and destruction; an Islam lusting for the blood of women and
children. This enemy captured the imagination of the masses and
supplied material for television and cinema. It provided lecture
topics for learned professors and fresh inspiration for popular
writers. The White House was occupied by a moron who declared a
world-wide "War on Terrorism".

When Obama is now uprooting this myth, he is revolutionizing American
culture. He wipes away the picture of one enemy, without painting
another in its place. He preaches against the violent, adversary
attitude itself, and starts to work to replace it with a culture of
partnership between nations, civilizations and religions.

I see Obama as the first great messenger of the 21st century. He is
the son of a new era, where the economy is global and the whole of
humanity faces the danger to the very existence of life on the planet
Earth. An era where the Internet connects a boy in New Zealand with a
girl in Namibia in real time, where a disease in a small Mexican
village spreads all over the globe within days.

This world needs a world law, a world order, a world democracy.
That's why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic
contours of a world constitution.


WHILE OBAMA proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is
returning to the 19th.

That was the century when a narrow, egocentric, aggressive
nationalism took root in many countries. A century that sanctified
the belligerent nation which oppresses minorities and subdues
neighbors. The century that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism and to
its response -- modern Zionism.

Obama's vision is not anti-national. He spoke with pride about the
American nation. But his nationalism is of another sort: an
inclusive, multi-cultural and non-sexist nationalism, which includes
all the citizens of a country and respects other nations.

This is the nationalism of the 21st century, which is inexorably
striving towards supranational, regional and world-wide structures.

Compared to this, how miserable is the mental world of the Israeli
Right! How miserable is the violent, fanatical-religious world of the
settlers, the chauvinist ghetto of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak,
the racist-fascist closed-in world of their Kahanist allies!

One has to understand this moral and spiritual dimension of Obama's
speech before considering its political implications. Not only in the
political sphere are Obama and Netanyahu on a collision course. The
underlying collision is between two mental worlds which are as
distinct from each other as the sun and the moon.

In Obama's mental world, there is no place for the Israeli Right or
its equivalents elsewhere. Not for their terminology, not for their
"values", and still less for their actions.


IN THE political sphere, too, a huge gap has opened up between the
governments of Israel and the USA.

During the last few years, successive Israeli governments have ridden
the wave of Islamophobia that has spread throughout the West. The
Islamic world was considered the deadly enemy, America was galloping
grimly towards the Clash of Civilizations, every Muslim was a
potential terrorist.

Israel's right-wing leaders could rejoice. After all, the
Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs are Muslims, the Muslims are
Terrorists -- so that Israel was assured a central place in the war
of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.
        
That was a Garden of Eden for racist demagogues. Avigdor Lieberman
could advocate the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, Ellie Yishai
could enact laws for the revocation of the citizenship of non-Jews.
Obscure Members of the Knesset could grab headlines with bills that
might have been conceived in Nuremberg.

This Garden of Eden is no more. Whether the implications will become
clear quickly or slowly - the direction is obvious. If we continue on
our path, we will become a leper colony.


THE TONE makes the music -- and this applies also to the President's
words on Israel and Palestine. He spoke at length about the Holocaust
? honest and courageous words, full of empathy and compassion, which
were received by the Egyptians in silence but with respect. He
stressed Israel's right to exist. And without pausing, he spoke about
the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, the intolerable situation
of the Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian aspirations for a state of
their own.

He spoke respectfully about Hamas. Not anymore as a "terrorist
organization", but as a part of the Palestinian people. He demanded
that they recognize Israel and stop violence, but also hinted that he
would welcome a Palestinian unity government.

The political message was clear and unequivocal: the Two-State
Solution will be put into practice. He himself will see to that.
Settlement activity must cease. Unlike his predecessors, he did not
stop at speaking about "Palestinians", but uttered the decisive word:
"Palestine" ? the name of a state and a territory.

And no less important: the Iran war has been struck from the agenda.
The dialogue with Tehran, as a part of the new world, is not limited
in time. As from now, no one can even dream about an American OK for
an Israeli attack.


HOW DID official Israel respond? The first reaction was denial. "An
unimportant speech". "There was nothing new". The establishment
commentators picked out a few pro-Israeli sentences from the text and
ignored all the others. And after all, "these are just words. So he
talked. Nothing will come out of it."

That is nonsense. The words of the President of the United States are
more than just words. They are political facts. They change the
perceptions of hundreds of millions. The Muslim public listened. The
American public listened. It may take some time for the message to
sink in. But after this speech, the pro-Israel lobby will never be
the same as it was before. The era of "foile shtik" (Yiddish for
sneaky tricks) is over. The sly dishonesty of a Shimon Peres, the
guileful deceits of an Ehud Olmert, the sweet talking of a Bibi
Netanyahu ? all these belong to the past.

The Israeli people must now decide: whether to follow the right-wing
government towards an inevitable collision with Washington, as the
Jews did 1940 years ago when they followed the Zealots into a
suicidal war on Rome ? or to join Obama's march towards a new world.


----------------------- end quote ------------------

Uri Avnery's weekly Column is to be found here:
> <http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/he/channels/avnery>

  
  

Yours, 
Lüko Willms 
Frankfurt/Main 
/ Lueko.Willms@xxxxxxxxxxx 



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