President Barack Obama promised that his would be the most transparent administration in US history. And the truth is, it was. At least in relation to his policies toward the Muslim world, Obama told us precisely what he intended to do and then he did it.
A mere week remains of Obama’s tenure
in office. But Obama remains intent on carrying on as if he will never
leave power. He has pledged to continue to implement his goals for the next
week and then to serve as the most outspoken ex-president in US history.
In all of Obama’s recent appearances,
his message is one of vindication. I came. I succeeded. I will continue to
succeed. I represent the good people, the people of tomorrow. My opponents
represent the Manichean, backward past. We will fight them forever and we will
prevail.
Tuesday Obama gave his final interview
to the Israeli media to Ilana Dayan from Channel 2’s Uvda news magazine. Dayan
usually tries to come off as an intellectual. On Tuesday’s show, she cast aside
professionalism however, and succumbed to her inner teenybopper. Among her
other questions, she asked Obama the secret to his preternatural ability to
touch people’s souls.
The only significant exchange in their
conversation came when Dayan asked Obama about the speech he gave on June 4,
2009, in Cairo. Does he still stand by all the things he said in that speech?
Would he give that speech again today, given all that has since happened in the
region, she asked.
Absolutely, Obama responded.
The speech, he insisted was
“aspirational” rather than programmatic. And the aspirations that he expressed
in that address were correct.
If Dayan had been able to put aside
her hero worship for a moment, she would have stopped Obama right then and
there. His claim was preposterous.
But, given her decision to expose
herself as a slobbering groupie, Dayan let it slide.
To salvage the good name of the
journalism, and more important, to understand Obama’s actual record and its
consequences, it is critical however to return to that speech.
Obama’s speech at Cairo University was
the most important speech of his presidency. In it he laid out both his
“aspirational” vision of relations between the West and the Islamic world and
his plans for implementing his vision. The fundamentally transformed world he
will leave President-elect Donald Trump to contend with next Friday was
transformed on the basis of that speech.
Obama’s address that day at Cairo
University lasted for nearly an hour. In the first half he set out his
framework for understanding the nature of the US’s relations with the Muslim
world and the relationship between the Western world and Islam more generally.
He also expressed his vision for how that relationship should change.
The US-led West he explained had
sinned against the Muslim world through colonialism and racism.
It needed to make amends for its past
and make Muslims feel comfortable and respected, particularly female Muslims,
covered from head to toe.
As for the Muslims, well, September 11
was wrong but didn’t reflect the truth of Islam, which is extraordinary. Obama
thrice praised “the Holy Koran.” He quoted it admiringly. He waxed poetic in
his appreciation for all the great contributions Islamic civilization has made
to the world – he even made up a few. And he insisted falsely that Islam has
always been a significant part of the American experience.
In his dichotomy between two human
paths – the West’s and Islam’s – although he faulted the records of both, Obama
judged the US and the West more harshly than Islam.
In the second half of his address,
Obama detailed his plans for changing the West’s relations with Islam in a
manner that reflected the true natures of both.
In hindsight, it is clear that during
the seven and a half years of his presidency that followed that speech, all of
Obama’s actions involved implementing the policy blueprint he laid out in
Cairo.
He never deviated from the course he
spelled out.
Obama promised to withdraw US forces
from Iraq regardless of the consequences. And he did.
He promised he would keep US forces in
Afghanistan but gave them no clear mission other than being nice to everyone
and giving Afghans a lot of money. And those have been his orders ever since.
Then he turned his attention to Israel
and the Palestinians. Obama opened this section by presenting his ideological
framework for understanding the conflict. Israel he insisted was not
established out of respect of the Jews’ national rights to their historic homeland.
It was established as a consolation prize to the Jews after the Holocaust.
That is, Israel is a product of
European colonialism, just as Iran and Hamas claim.
In contrast, the Palestinians are the
indigenous people of the land. They have been the primary victims of the
colonial West’s post-Holocaust guilty conscience. Their suffering is real and
legitimate.
Hamas’s opposition to Israel is
legitimate, he indicated. Through omission, Obama made clear that he has no
ideological problem with Hamas – only with its chosen means of achieving its
goal.
Rather than fire missiles at Israel,
he said, Hamas should learn from its fellow victims of white European
colonialist racists in South Africa, in India, and among the African-American
community.
Like them Hamas should use nonviolent
means to achieve its just aims.
Obama’s decision attack Israel at the
UN Security Council last month, his attempts to force Israel to accept Hamas’s
cease-fire demands during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, his consistent
demand that Israel renounce Jewish civil and property rights in united
Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, his current refusal to rule out the
possibility of enabling another anti-Israel resolution to pass at the Security
Council next week, and his contempt for the Israeli Right all are explained,
envisioned and justified explicitly or implicitly in his Cairo speech.
One of the more notable but less
discussed aspects of Obama’s assertion that the Palestinians are in the right
and Israel is in the wrong in the speech, was his embrace of Hamas. Obama made
no mention of the PLO or the Palestinian Authority or Fatah in his speech. He
mentioned only Hamas – the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which
shares the Brotherhood’s commitment to annihilating Israel and wiping out the
Jewish people worldwide.
Sitting in the audience that day in
Cairo were members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak
rightly viewed Obama’s insistence that the brothers be invited to his address
as a hostile act. Due to this assessment, Mubarak boycotted the speech and
refused to greet Obama at the Cairo airport.
Two years later, Obama supported
Mubarak’s overthrow and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to replace him.
Back to the speech.
Having embraced the Muslim Brotherhood
and its Palestinian branch, branded Israel a colonial implant and discredited
the US’s moral claim to world leadership, Obama turned his attention to Iran.
Obama made clear that his intention as
president was to appease the ayatollahs. America he explained had earned their
hatred because in 1953 the CIA overthrew the pro-Soviet regime in Iran and
installed the pro-American shah in its place.
True, since then the Iranians have done all sorts of mean things to America.
But America’s original sin of intervening in 1953 justified Iran’s aggression.
Obama indicated that he intended to
appease Iran by enabling its illicit nuclear program to progress.
Ignoring the fact that Iran’s illegal
nuclear program placed it in material breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, Obama argued that as an NPT signatory, Iran had a right to a peaceful
nuclear program. As for the US and the rest of the members of the nuclear club,
Obama intended to convince everyone to destroy their nuclear arsenals.
And in the succeeding years, he took a
hacksaw to America’s nuclear force.
After Obama’s speech in Cairo, no one
had any cause for surprise at the reports this week that he approved the
transfer of 116 tons of uranium to Iran. Likewise, no one should have been
surprised by his nuclear deal or by his willingness to see Iran take over Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. No one should be surprised by his cash payoffs to the
regime or his passivity in the face of repeated Iranian acts of aggression
against US naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
Everything that Obama has done since
he gave that speech was alluded to or spelled out that day.
Certainly, nothing he has done was
inconsistent with what he said.
The consequences of Obama’s worldview
and the policies he laid out in Cairo have been an unmitigated disaster for
everyone. The Islamic world is in turmoil. The rising forces are those that
Obama favored that day: The jihadists.
ISIS, which Obama allowed to develop
and grow, has become the ideological guide not only of jihadists in the Middle
East but of Muslims in the West as well. Consequently it has destabilized not
only Iraq and Syria but Europe as well. As the victims of the Islamist
massacres in San Bernardino, Boston, Ft. Hood, Orlando and beyond can attest,
American citizens are also paying the price for Obama’s program.
Thanks to Obama, the Iranian regime
survived the Green Revolution. Due to his policies, Iran is both the master of
its nuclear fate and the rising regional hegemon.
Together with its Russian partners,
whose return to regional power after a 30-year absence Obama enabled, Iran has
overseen the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Sunnis in Syria and paved the way
for the refugee crisis that threatens the future of the European Union.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s
Islamist leader, was a principle beneficiary of Obama’s admiration of Islamism.
Erdogan rode Obama’s wave to destroy the last vestiges of the secular Turkish
Republic.
Now he is poised to leave NATO in
favor of an alliance with Russia.
Obama and his followers see none of
this. Faithful only to their ideology, Obama and his followers in the US and
around the world refuse to see the connection between the policies borne of
that ideology and their destructive consequences. They refuse to recognize that
the hatred for Western civilization and in particular of the Jewish state Obama
gave voice to in Cairo, and his parallel expression of admiration for radical
Islamic enemies of the West, have had and will continue to have horrific
consequences for the US and for the world as a whole.
Cairo is Obama’s legacy. His
followers’ refusal to acknowledge this truth means that it falls to those Obama
reviles to recognize the wages of the most transparent presidency in history.
It is their responsibility to undo the ideological and concrete damage to
humanity the program he first unveiled in that address and assiduously
implemented ever since has wrought.
Originally published in
The Jerusalem Post.
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