Reaction to Obama’s Cairo Speech

Steve Sheffey — June 8, 2009 – 4:24 pm | Israel | Foreign Policy | GOP Hypocrisies | Obama | Stop the Smears Comments (1) Add a comment

Last week in Cairo, President Obama told the Arab and Muslim world that America’s bond with Israel is “unbreakable.” He told the Arab and Muslim world, a world rife with Holocaust denial, that to deny the Holocaust is “baseless, ignorant, and hateful.”  He told them that threatening Israel with destruction is “deeply wrong.” He said that “Palestinians must abandon violence” and that “it is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus.” And he said that “Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

What would be enough for Obama’s critics? Should Obama have concluded his speech by asking his Arab audience to rise and join him in singing Hatikvah?  If Obama split the Red Sea and passed through it dry-shod, some of our Republican friends would rebuke him for disrupting the environment.  Three criticisms of Obama’s speech seem to be repeating themselves in another spat of ugly emails. Let’s consider them one by one.

Obama did not equate the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering.  Obama said that six million Jews were killed and that denying that fact is “baseless, ignorant, and hateful.” Nowhere in that paragraph did he talk at all about Palestinian suffering.  He did say in another paragraph—one that did not mention Jews or the Holocaust at all—that Palestinians have “suffered” and “endured the pain of dislocation.” So how does one  conclude that Obama thinks the killing of six million Jews is equivalent to humiliation and dislocation? Well, our Republican friends draw that conclusion because the two paragraphs are next to each other. He talked about Palestinian suffering immediately after talking about the Holocaust. What was Obama supposed to talk about next, the suffering of White Sox fans? Nothing he said equated the Jewish Holocaust experience with Palestinian suffering. When Obama visited Buchenwald the next day with Elie Weisel, he told Tom Brokaw on the Today show that “there is no equivalency.” How could he be clearer?

Obama did not equate Israel with South Africa. We must explain to anyone ignorant enough to compare Israel to South Africa why, on so many levels, this comparison is odious and is actually an insult to both Israel and South African blacks.  But Obama did not make this comparison. Obama told the Palestinians to stop violence. They think their cause is noble. Should Obama have said “violence didn’t work for Slobodan Milosevic so it won’t work for you”?  His point was that violence does not work even for noble causes, and if you think your cause is noble, you should eschew violence. Nothing Obama has ever said would lead one to believe his point was to compare South Africa to Israel.

Israel’s legitimacy is not based on the Holocaust.  Obama said that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” I don’t think anyone can argue with that. Obama was trying to persuade Arabs that they do not have a monopoly on suffering. Here Obama’s critics are right in pointing out how this statement can be misunderstood.  The Jewish people’s loss of their homeland and long exile was tragic, and it can’t be denied, but the legitimacy of the Jewish state is based on legal, historic, and moral truths that pre-date the Holocaust and are independent of Jewish suffering.

The mantra of Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist whose politics I differ with but whose brilliance I acknowledge, is “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” What Obama said seems clear to me, but what he said also gave his opponents enough rope to twist his words to fit their preconceptions. Obama could have found another way to exhort the Palestinians to stop violence without referring to South Africa, and he should have made clear his oft-stated conviction that Jews have a right to a Jewish state.

But step back and look at what Obama did say. An American president named “Barack Hussein Obama” went to Egypt and told the Arab and Muslim world in no uncertain terms that America’s bond with Israel “is unbreakable.”

The pro-Israel community should be cheering Obama’s speech, not splicing the text looking for hidden meanings and secret messages the way that pot-heads in college dorms used to try to decode “Revolution #9.” The ability of some of our Republican friends to ignore the good and find fault with everything Obama does reminds me of the story of the little boy who is playing at the beach and is washed away to sea. His grandmother pleads with God for his return. Miraculously, the tide brings him back, unharmed. The grandmother looks skyward and says, “But he had a hat.”

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