Obama in Cairo: High Words, Low Truths

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch
International
Posted by Bulatlat

As they drafted his speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo on Thursday, June 4, President Obama’s speech writers strove to suggest that cordiality towards Islam is soundly embedded in America’s cultural history. The first Muslim congressman, Obama confided to his vast audience across the Muslim world, was sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran.

No names were mentioned, but this would have been Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat elected in 2006. On his victory night rally the local crowd shouted “Allahu Akhbar!”. During the race Eillison understandably downplayed past associations with the Nation of Islam.

Obama also reminded the world that Morocco had been the first nation to recognize the infant United States, signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, which declared in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. The second US President, John Quincy Adams said that America had no quarrel with Islam.

It’s a stretch. As my father Claud said, Never believe anything till it is officially denied. Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states.

America needed free access to the Mediterranean and the Barbary “pirates” controlled the sea lanes and, furthermore, had several hundred thousand Christian slaves, all no doubt using the opportunity of captivity to imbibe the first principles of algebra, whose invention Obama took the opportunity in Cairo to lay at the feet of the mathematicians of Islam. He also credited Islam with the invention of printing and navigation which should surely require the Chinese People’s Republic to withdraw its ambassador in Washington DC. in formal diplomatic protest.

An early version of the “Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, written in 1805 amid the routing of the Barbary states, offered a view of Islam markedly different from Obama’s uplifting sentiments in Cairo:

In conflict resistless each toil they endur’d,
Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation:
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d
By the light of the star-bangled flag of our nation.
Where each flaming star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare.
Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

In 1814 Key rehabbed this doggerel into the Star Spangled Banner. So America’s national anthem began as a gleeful tirade against the Mahommedans. And of course every member of the U.S. Marine Corps regularly bellows out the USMC anthem, beginning “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

In short, America’s march to Empire was minted in the crucible of anti-Islamic sentiment. (One admirer of this early chapter in America’s imperial confrontations with Islam is that ardent Crusader, C. Hitchens who cites Joshua London’s Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, on the origins of the Star Spangled Banner.)

This is not to detract from Obama’s laudable efforts to rewrite history into a parable of tolerance and mutual respect. And some of the history Obama did get right. He’s surely the first president to state before several million people that the United States did play a role in overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in 1954. But his address signals the problem with presidential speeches professing moral purpose of the purest ichor. The higher the phrases soar, the more people start reminding themselves of the facts on the ground.

Probably Obama’s speech will be most vivid in its impact not across Islam but throughout the large portions of America that remain Christian in basic assumption. I spent a large portion of Wednesday in a car radiator repair shop in a small town here in northern California. The proprietor is a man of conservative views. As he dunked a radiator in a tank of terrifying green liquid on which floated a small wooden duck, he said with gloomy glee, “You see that Obama’s saying America isn’t a Christian nation? You see that? Well, the Founders were Christian! The pledge of allegiance calls us ‘One nation under God’! And, it says right here on the dollar bill, ‘In God we trust.’” He winched the radiator out of the green poison and the duck bobbed up and down.

Though I forbore to point it out, his facts were a bit off, just like Obama’s. Many of the Founders, Jefferson preeminently, were Deists at most. The phrase “one nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (written by Francis Bellamy in 1892) in 1954, amid the Cold War. President Eisenhower explained that “in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.” Bellamy’s version, written for a children’s magazine to celebrate Columbus Day, said simply, “I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

“In God we trust” was first put on coins in the early 1860s amid a surge of religious sentiment in the Civil War. A pastor from Pennsylvania successfully urged the phrase’s addition “to relieve us of the ignominy of heathenism”. It disappeared and reappeared on metal money down the decades. Teddy Roosevelt thought it was cheap hucksterism, writing that “it seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins.” In 1955 Congress passed a law requiring the phrase to be on all US currency since “In these days when imperialistic and materialistic Communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, it is proper” to “remind all of us of this self-evident truth” that “as long as this country trusts in God, it will prevail.”

Obama, who can parade his Christian beliefs when it suits him, was on track historically by quoting in Cairo what was in fact America’s unofficial motto in the early years, “E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.” Given the tirades of my radiator man and of right-wing radio commentators on Obama’s speech, it was certainly bracing to listen to a black American president evoke his childhood in Indonesia: “I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”

But Obama’s initial, irreproachable calls for mutual tolerance and respect gave way to boilerplate about America’s greatness and the need for an alliance of tolerant religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism, in case you’re wondering) against “violent extremism”.

“I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, “ Obama declared in Cairo, “and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.” Vivid in the minds of many Muslims listening to this passage would have been the fate at the start of this week of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih — a 31-year old Yemeni who had been in a wire cage since February, 2002 (more than seven years) without charges and declared by his U.S. military jailers “an apparent suicide”. Salih, on hunger strike, was down to 85 pounds.

Torture is certainly the label any morally balanced person would attach to his travails and it’s quite reasonable to speculate that his end came amid yet another attempt to forcibly feed him. Air Force One headed for Cairo with one Muslim barely in the ground after having been tortured to death in a US prison. Many in Obama’s audience would have been well aware too that even if – a big “if” – Guantanamo does get shut down, its inmates will endure similar horrors in Bagram, and that Obama favors imprisonment, permanent if necessary, of enemy combatants, without charges or trial.

Obama’s talk of the evils of Al Quaida’s “violent extremism ” will have fallen ironically on the ears of Palestinians who endured Israel’s monstrous and criminal onslaught in Gaza earlier this year, or of Afghans still seething at the loss of civilians in US bombing raids. The noble pledges about economic assistance to the Muslim world sound hollow against the realities of how US aid really gets administered, starting with the huge sums filched by the “non-profit” aid agencies.