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Chomsky on Obama Speech
By Noam Chomsky
Chomsky, whose recent books include "Interventions" and "The Essential Chomsky," sent the following to the Institute for Public Accuracy this morning: "A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads 'Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.' Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.
"Keeping just to Israel-Palestine -- there was nothing substantive about anything else -- Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to 'point fingers' at each other or to 'see this conflict only from one side or the other.' There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.
"Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.
"Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as 'an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.' How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June '67) border, perhaps with 'minor and mutual modifications,' to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s, vetoing a Security Council resolution backed by the Arab 'confrontation states' (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political settlement. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The Initiative cannot be a 'beginning' if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them.
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"In the background is the Obama administration's goal, enunciated most clearly by Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the 'moderate' Arab states against Iran. The term 'moderate' has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands.
"What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: 'Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).' All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable.
"Overlooked in the debate over settlements is that even if Israel were to accept Phase I of the Road Map, that would leave in place the entire settlement project that has already been developed, with decisive U.S. support, to ensure that Israel will take over the valuable land within the illegal 'separation wall' (including the primary water supplies of the region) as well as the Jordan Valley, thus imprisoning what is left, which is being broken up into cantons by settlement/infrastructure salients extending far to the East. Unmentioned as well is that Israel is taking over Greater Jerusalem, the site of its major current development programs, displacing many Arabs, so that what remains to Palestinians will be separated from the center of their cultural, economic, and sociopolitical life. Also unmentioned is that all of this is in violation of international law, as conceded by the government of Israel after the 1967 conquest, and reaffirmed by Security Council resolutions and the International Court of Justice. Also unmentioned are Israel's successful operations since 1991 to separate the West Bank from Gaza, since turned into a prison where survival is barely possible, further undermining the hopes for a viable Palestinian state.
"It is worth remembering that there has been one break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. President Clinton recognized that the terms he had offered at the failed 2000 Camp David meetings were not acceptable to any Palestinians, and in December, proposed his 'parameters,' vague but more forthcoming. He then announced that both sides had accepted the parameters, though both had reservations. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt to iron out the differences, and made considerable progress. A full resolution could have been reached in a few more days, they announced in their final joint press conference. But Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, and they have not been formally resumed. The single exception indicates that if an American president is willing to tolerate a meaningful diplomatic settlement, it can very likely be reached.
"It is also worth remembering that the Bush I administration went a bit beyond words in objecting to illegal Israeli settlement projects, namely, by withholding U.S. economic support for them. In contrast, Obama administration officials stated that such measures are 'not under discussion' and that any pressures on Israel to conform to the Road Map will be 'largely symbolic,' so the New York Times reported (Helene Cooper, June 1).
"There is more to say, but it does not relieve the grim picture that Obama has been painting, with a few extra touches in his widely-heralded address to the Muslim World in Cairo on June 4."
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Very typically Obama; confident and charming, intellectually deceptive and sugar-coating his evasion of all the relevant issues. With cunning and charisma he deftly evades discussion of the hidden US intent, applies every rhetorical ruse and every dirty political trick.
Obama wants to give full support to the Israeli agenda - the complete absorption of Palestine into the state of israel and dominance over the Arab states of the middle east - as a means to continued American dominance of the world\'s key oil resources.
Chomsky wants to live in a country that is a shining light on the hill, a beacon of moral and intellectual integrity and justice that becons the way to a harmonious existence for all mankind on a finite planet.
The problem that Chomsky faces is that there are too many Americans who are either brain dead or blindly following the pied piper. Yhos is the pied piper who took them through revolution on false pretenses and kept them under control for cenyuries aferwards with a constitutional document full of empty words - instantly demolished by the barbaric genocide of the native people and endemic social, legal and economic discrimination against it\'s former slaves. They believe that hevinf \"put all this behind them\" they can move on to the next sordid phase of SELF. They never notice that it is their shameful, unrepented past that denies them the happiness they relentlessly pursue through wealth acquisition and military and economic dominance.
The pied pipers of America are safely protected by bought and paid for people, the massive instruments of police, military and security services who separate them from their subjugated masses, The ordinary people of America immerse themselves in \"patriotism\" and the illusion that they too can \"make it in the land of opportunity\", rather than dare to express their disgust for the wealthy elite who deprive them of dignity.
Under this pathetic crust, this scab of a society, is festering every imaginable psychosis - principally a gripping paranoia of endless enemies without and within, a relentless need for matetial reassurance of adequacy, insatiable demand for devices - from power tools to SUVs that give the illusion of power and ever-waiting, just under the surface of every American lurks the monster that may one day shoot up his school-mates or coleagues, tahe to drive-by shootings or murder his own family before suicide because the ever-waiting reality of the hopelessness of American life has finally overtaken them.
SAD, very SAD.
What is saddest is that this festering pool of filth is about to boil over and infect every remaining pocket of sane life on planet earth.
It\'s the loomig final act of the human tragedy, just before the curtain of environmental catastrophy comes down on the stage.
The problem is that Chomsky now is the unpalatable brocolli on your plate, next the perfectly cooked steak with fried onions. Previously, it was only next to yesterday's re-heated fries : it was more obvious they were bad for you if you gave it a moments clear thought.
However, history shows us that the gifted orator suceeds over the intellectual. My fear is that Obama is so seductive, so sweet to ear and the eye, that manufacturing consent just got much, much easier.
Theirs is the most tragic condition. Imagine a poisoned well in a parched desert. Those with the power to command control of the well, denying water to all the rest and drinking an abundance for themselves are not as fortunate as they may appear.
The effects of the poison in the well of American consumerist society are not so obvious as an instant and painful death, or the situation would never be as it is. The first of the poisonous effects of this contaminated well are to blind the victim to the other effects; the paranoia, the feelings of perpetual inadequacy, the desperate need for the illusion of power. These are the cramps, the torturous nerve damage the desperation of choking suffered by the elite at the forefront of American society and their only relief is to drink more from the well.
Meanwhile, as we all queue for our turn at the well a desert storm is brewing that will sweep us all away; all so busy with the well that we failed to see and prepare for it.
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Tags: Noam Chomsky Obama speech Public Accuracy Israel-Palestine