“The streets surrounding the university and across the city were largely quiet and empty on Thursday. Many workers in this Egyptian capital on the Nile had been told to stay home. The sidewalks were closed to ordinary people but lined by hundreds of soldiers – some dressed in black, others in white – who had been standing in place for hours before Mr Obama arrived.” The New York Times, 5 June 2009.

pseudo-event management
When it comes to what passes for US criticism of Israel, the gentlest of differences combined with a steady flow of staggeringly-unrestrained military and financial aid - aid not contingent on the Israeli state taking action in relation to that absurdly procrustean critique possible in US public discourse - is apparently “talking tough”.

When it comes to the Palestinian population being systematically squeezed into ever-smaller hells, with the use of precisely that aid, those guns, that money, ridiculous sanctimonious moralizing and crypto-racist representations of Palestinians as, for some reason, just given to immoral and criminal violence - well, that is ‘reaching out’, extending a hand in a gesture of friendship and respect, an historic opportunity, a moment for hope, “a bold overture to the Islamic world”, as Jeff Zelany and Alan Cowell put it in the New York Times article quoted above.

And the bizarre thing is that, in a way, it is indeed all those things, including a significant shift in the terms of the usual orwellian representations of kafkaesque realities. At the outer limits of permissible intervention, publicly noticing that Israel is continuing to aggressively colonize the territories and even saying that this should stop, in the context of this speech addressing ‘Muslims’, is indeed an event. Though the last Bush publicly made reference to the desirability of a “Palestinian state”, so the novelty shouldn’t be overstated.

That Obama said something not entirely meaningless is true even if his equation of Palestinian resistance and Islam is more-than-a-little reductive, acting as a ratification of the religious terms of struggle in a way probably more about the views and objectives of US geopoliticians than about the history of struggles against zionist settler-colonialism, or about the imperatives underlying that settler-colonialism. To suggest a parallel, in what was to become Australia, the British penal-colonizers and the later settler-colonizers didn’t destroy and displace Indigenous societies because of religious differences, however much the process was accompanied by declarations about the one true God or by efforts at conversion of ‘natives’ - rather, the great empire colonized because it wanted the land as territory for its projects, and eventually for a new state, integrated into imperial political-economy. It was the form and existence of these societies which centrally posed obstacles to the projects of the Europeans, not whatever religious beliefs those already here may have had. And so too it is in Palestine, historically and even now, when Islamist politics is stronger within Palestine than ever before. When prominent Israeli figures talk, as they often do, publicly and overtly, about ‘demographic’ problems, they are worried about the sheer existence of too many non-Jews, conceived as a threat to the current configuration of the state by their status as people living there, not because they are Muslims. It never mattered that the late George Habash came from a Christian Palestinian background, or that the PFLP (and the DFLP, whatever one may think of their current role) was not merely secular but largely atheist… I think I’ve made my point…

SBS right again: world continues to be amazing place.
But then no-one should have expected reality to make more than a cameo appearance in any speech by Obama. The words that come out of President Obama’s mouth are not bad; the words are awful. Obama’s speechwriters seem totally unembarrassed about bypassing reality, history, even sanity, and Obama himself seems equally relaxed. This has been true from his very first speech, an inauguration address which was either ignorant and reactionary or else almost astonishingly inarticulate.

Leaving aside those patriotic observations such as that “each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries” - Venezuela, those Arabs and Muslims - much of that first address was a long and ridiculous declaration of a War Against the Lazy, with long discussions about how hard everyone has to work - not just that much must be done, but specifically that people must work hard i.e. in reference to wage-labor.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Now that is surrealpolitik. Slaves as patriots working hard to build the country because of their belief in America: that is how Obama discussed US history. Why not those sturdy, strong Native Americans whose belief in the greatness of this nation had them work so hard at being wiped out so that it could grow? Obama’s inauguration address was so ridiculous that I actually felt disappointment. (And by the way - they died in Khe Sanh to build their country?)

Now it would be years more of someone with no shame about talking nonsense about everything all the time. I honestly never believed he would seriously attempt to stop torture or people being kept in cages forever for no reason or the US repressive apparatuses assassinating people or keeping millions in US jails or running endless counter-insurgency wars and I’m thus pretty calm about the fact that, despite how the media like to portray things, he is acting exactly as I expect.

But I do care about the quality of what I read every day and see on the television, and I am actually disappointed that Obama is going to spend the next years spouting blather with no connection to any world beyond the imperatives of the shallowest propaganda. How annoying. Helping fuck over enormous populations is one thing; by firing pious greeting-card sentiments about it in all directions, he makes me one of his victims too.

And now there is this latest bit of business in Cairo. Obama’s speechwriters have a knack for fitting pleasant, even left-liberal phrases about tolerance and respect and non-violence into banal but friendly soundbites in support of almost anything. Take this little equation, from the speech at Al-Azhar University: “Just as Moslems do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.” Stereotypes are bad, Sesame Street taught us the value of cooperation, why can’t we all just be friends? Obama is certainly friends with the current ruler of Egypt, “a stalwart ally” in his words, and not at all, despite some issues, a stereotype of corrupt, violent, repressive despotism maintained under an endless “state of emergency”, twenty-eight years and still running.

a quick note
The mention of the PFLP above is not just gratuitous, given the continuing international efforts to criminalize the group or any support for even the most innocuous of activities connected with it. The PFLP are simply terrorists. Under a 1996 law supported by Clinton, the US froze any assets declared to be those of the group, while making “material support” for the PFLP a criminal offense. In this day and age, who among us can honestly say that they have never wanted to hijack a plane, or put a bullet in a cabinet minister?

Denmark, for one, has followed suit - not with the plane hijacking but with the anti-PFLP criminalization - most notably by charging a half-dozen people in the group ‘Fighters + Lovers’ with financing terrorism by selling t-shirts over the net with PFLP logos, with the intention of donating a portion of the proceeds to humanitarian projects being organized by the group. The media has tended to report this last in inverted commas - “humanitarian projects” - but the extensive involvement in the PFLP in such projects, most notably healthcare in the territories, is hardly a secret. The hospitals staffed with doctors who are in the PFLP are hardly a trick to recruit terrorists; a largely stateless population created welfare, medical, political and military organizations, and the lifetimes of committed work performed by those involved do not simply amount to the development of ‘fronts’ just because some powers don’t like the politics of those involved.