Financial Times Editorial Comment: Obama gets off to a new beginning/Obama cracks the code to reach Islam

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Obama gets off to a new beginning
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: June 4 2009 19:40 | Last updated: June 4 2009 19:40
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ac64d90-5136-11de-84c3-00144feabdc0.html


When George W. Bush made his last visit to the Middle East he was greeted with a volley of shoes, a mark of contempt that measured with lamentable accuracy the level to which America’s reputation had sunk in the region during his eight long years in power.

Barack Obama, in his speech on Thursday to the Arab and Muslim worlds from Cairo University, arrived to a standing ovation and left to rapturous applause. He has started a new conversation. While all now depends on what the US does rather than what its president says, Mr Obama has changed the tone of relations between the west and the world of Islam.

The speech was brilliant. With artful sensitivity he navigated through minefields littered with cultural explosive devices and politico-religious booby-traps, dodging ambushes without evading the issues. He was so word-perfect that his one slip – mispronouncing hijab – must have been a teleprompter error.

He made it plain to the differing constituencies in his audience that he gets it, exhibiting a sketched but deep appreciation of the past and of recent history that brought relations to where they are now.

He spoke a language of aspiration: tailored to the young, who typically amount to between half and two-thirds of the populations of Arab and Muslim countries; to women; and to a thirst for freedom. This was not Nixon in China, it was Kennedy in Berlin.

In his pledge to fight crude stereotypes of Muslims, and his plea against stereotyping of Americans, he recalled the ideals of the republic in which Arabs had placed such hope because it stood against colonialism. “We were born out of revolution against an empire,” he reminded his audience.

Mr Obama offered no quarter to jihadi extremists whose murderous activity is “irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations and with Islam”. But he distinguished clearly between the war of necessity that brought US troops to Afghanistan and the war of choice that led to the debacle in Iraq, which he believed reminded the US of the value of diplomacy and building consensus to resolve problems. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”

Announcing a (hopefully) orderly pull-back from Iraq, he said “we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq’s sovereignty is its own.”

The president laid out clearly why US bonds with Israel are unbreakable. But in language seldom, if ever, heard from an American leader, he said that “just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s”.

Reiterating what he recently told Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who refuses to rein in colonisation of occupied Palestinian land or back a two-states solution, the president said “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements”. His implicit comparison of the “intolerable” situation of the Palestinians under “occupation” with the struggles of African slaves in America and South African blacks under apartheid will signal to the irredentist right in Israel and the Likudnik lobby in the US that they are dealing with someone who means business.

But what all parties in this enduring conflict will now be watching intently is the test of wills between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu: to see who blinks first.

The president gave a nuanced defence of democratic rights that, while distinct from the discredited neo-conservative conviction that America and its allies could bomb the region into a better future, was uncompromisingly on the side of freedom and the rule of law. Formally banned though elected members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the audience at US insistence, certainly understood that, greeting those remarks with whoops of applause. When Condoleezza Rice set out Mr Bush’s “freedom agenda” in Cairo four years ago, she expressly ruled out any contact with the Brothers.

Hopefully, they and mainstream Islamists elsewhere will also have understood Mr Obama’s caveats that power should be exercised through consent, tolerance, compromise and respect for minorities and other religious beliefs.

But what the peoples of the broader Middle East will also want to know is whether the US will continue to collude with despotic regimes. Decades of support for local tyrants, every bit as much as unconditional backing for Israel, is what has most inflated Islamist appeal. That is something “realists” should really think about.




Obama cracks the code to reach Islam - Implementing coherent policies will be far more challenging, if not impossible
By Roula Khalaf
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: June 4 2009 18:37 | Last updated: June 4 2009 20:05
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0e8e6b2c-512c-11de-84c3-00144feabdc0.html

No wonder extremist leaders were nervous ahead of Barack Obama’s landmark address in Cairo, frantically firing off warnings to Muslims not to fall for his words.

For years the likes of Osama bin Laden have claimed to speak on behalf of oppressed Muslim communities as they perverted the message of Islam and exploited the conflicts in the Middle East to stoke fear and violence.

But Mr Obama took them on, not with threats to “smoke them out” or warnings that “you are with us or against us”, but with eloquence, authority, a deep grasp of Muslim history and an understanding of Muslim grievances.

Opening with a broad smile and the Muslim greeting of “Assalum Alaykum” (peace be upon you), Mr Obama drew on his family ties to Islam (mentioning his middle name Hussein) and his respect for Islamic civilisation to present himself as a credible interlocutor eager to end the “cycle of suspicion and discord”.

Rarely, if ever, has an American leader drawn so much applause from an audience in the Muslim world, or dared to quote the Koran so often (the only glitch in Mr Obama’s speech, and it was minor, was to refer to the Muslim headscarf, which he defended, as a hajib, rather than a hijab). The audience, selected by the US to include friends and foes of America, gave Mr Obama a standing ovation.

Throughout the speech his message was the US was neither weak nor looking to appease its enemies but would act with fairness and on the basis of mutual respect.

Yes, the US has made mistakes, he said, acknowledging it had played a role in the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew a democratically elected government. But he insisted that “we must not be prisoners” of the past.

If there was a magic list of words his audience wanted to hear, he delivered it. He spoke of the pain of colonialism, the suffering of Palestinians under occupation (their situation was “intolerable”), and the need for Israel to stop expanding settlements.

He underlined the US’s resolve to withdraw from Iraq and, eventually Afghanistan, without leaving “military bases”, countering deeply held suspicions in the region. And he highlighted a continued commitment to “democracy” and the rule of law, even as he warned that no country should impose its model of governance on another.

But he stated bluntly the US bond with Israel was “unbreakable” and called on Palestinians and Arab governments to contribute to the search for peace and choose “progress” over the “self-defeating” policies of the past.

With the change of tone from the Bush years, and the gracious delivery – the word “terrorism” did not even feature – Mr Obama has started turning the page on eight years in which the “war on terror” was perceived by Muslims as an attack on Islam.

Even before the speech, there were signs that thanks to his personal appeal, the US’s battered image in the Arab world was starting to improve. There were also hints that in Iran, for example, Mr Obama was perceived by the regime as more threatening than George W. Bush because of his ability to present a more moderate face of America.

But the speech also poses risks for Mr Obama. While he addressed masterfully the conflicting pressures the US faces in the region, he will find translating them into coherent policies far more challenging, if not impossible.

Mr Obama called for a joint effort to create a world where extremists no longer threatened Americans, US troops returned home, Israelis and Palestinians lived in secure states of their own, and nuclear energy was used only for peaceful purposes. It is an ambitious vision that would transform the Middle East, but it raises expectations far beyond the US’s ability to deliver.