Obama Reaching for Hearts and Minds
By Greg Sheridan
Barack Obama has made a bold, characteristically eloquent attempt to appeal over the heads of the gatekeepers of official opinion in the Muslim world to the great mass of moderate Muslims.
Obama called for a new partnership between the US and Muslims. He firmly restated his determination to combat extremism and violence. He admitted some mistakes in US policy. He committed himself to working for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He supported human rights and specifically women's rights in Muslim countries. He skilfully drew on his life experiences to convey an appreciation of the richness of Islamic culture and history.
He also defined and defended what America is. To an audience of Muslims all across the world, many of whom sadly still believe the weirdest conspiracy theories about 9/11, Obama spoke in plain language: al-Qa'ida murdered 3000 civilians on 9/11. He defended US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most importantly, he spoke of the US's "unbreakable" bonds to Israel. People tend to overlook this, but Obama has been just as forthright as George W. Bush in his public commitments to Israel.
Obama also repeated Bush's opposition to Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. It's wrong to suggest this is a break from Bush. Condoleezza Rice was explicit, in Israel, in condemning extensions or even natural growth, even to Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem that have been formally annexed by Israel but that were not part of Israel before 1967. Obama, like Bush, called for a Palestinian state. Obama praised Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish homeland, denounced terrorism against Israel and denounced Holocaust denial of the type undertaken by the Iranian government, though Obama didn't mention Iran in this context by name.
On all questions of substance Obama is continuing Bush's policies. But the presentation and packaging are very different.
Obama said all this to rapturous applause. So, in the face of all that, it may seem a little niggardly to cavil at the speech's imperfections. Still, I'd give it about seven out of 10. As well as its strengths, it had some real problems.
Four are structural. Most Middle East Muslim audiences get their news through state-dominated media that greatly distorts reality. The samizdat and internet alternatives are often even more distorted and dominated by conspiracy theories. A revealing piece of journalism came straight after the speech when CNN's Stan Grant sought reaction at an elite university in Afghanistan. One articulate young woman who spoke good English informed Grant that the previous US president, Bush, was Jewish and supported the Taliban. Other students believe Obama is a Muslim.
The Islamic world is very diverse and Afghanistan is hardly representative. But the fog of absolute distortion and misrepresentation throughout the Islamic world will make it hard for Obama to change the US's image there.
This leads to structural problem No.2. There is no comprehensive US-based communications effort with Muslims in the way there was with people living under communism during the Cold War. The parallels are very imperfect and Islam is not remotely the same as communism. But there is a parallel in this one sense. The US needs to communicate the truth to hundreds of millions of people who cannot get the truth from the mainstream media in the societies in which they live. So far, official US efforts at this giant, historic task have been fitful, confused and under-resourced.
Third, the speech, in part because of its studied ambiguity on many key points, will generate unrealistic expectations among Muslims. They believe the US needs to change, not them. But Obama is actually promising the continuation of all US policies in substance, with only a change in the tone and rhetoric. That is the right thing for Obama to do, but eventually all the policies that millions of Muslims hate will continue, and they will continue to hate these policies and may even come to hate Obama for leading them to expect something different. Nonetheless, it is right for Obama to make the effort.
Finally, Obama seemed to accede to the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the heart of the US-Islam problem. This, as Obama knows, is nonsense and he acknowledged as much by asking Muslim leaders to stop using it as a distraction from other issues in their own societies.
Beyond these structural problems there were some frankly weird little bits to the speech. Obama constantly defended the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab but never defended the right of Muslim women not to wear the hijab. This is really and truly deeply dumb and is a typical State Department style mistake, in which the US defines Islam in a way that concedes the purely internal Islamic arguments about practice and lifestyle to the most conservative elements. This is not cultural sensitivity, it's American stupidity.
Similarly, while Obama is a strong defender of Israel, including in this speech, he did not defend it as a democracy, which is the real basis for its US support. The passages on the need for Islamic societies to be tolerant of their own religious minorities were also a bit strange. He nominated the Copts in Egypt, which was fair enough, but then added the Maronites in Lebanon. So Lebanon now is an Islamic state that must be tolerant of the Maronite minority, who were once the majority, of course, until they were in effect driven out of their homeland. And bizarrely there was no mention of the shocking persecution of the Baha'is in Iran, one of the most egregious of all the cases of sustained religious persecution.
The lame speechmaker's tendency to equate all sides of every dispute also seemed to see an equivalence between defects in American civil society and systemic dictatorship in the Arab world, and between faults in Israeli democracy and decades of terrorism, anti-Semitism and maximalist rejectionism by Palestinian leaders.
There was also a lot of ambiguity in key passages. The section on Israeli settlements was quite opaque, for all its seeming boldness, and may even constitute a walk back from recent pressure on Israel. It's hard to know.
Bottom line, Obama made a good pitch: it's just not absolutely certain in all respects what he's selling or whether anyone will buy it.
