Lamis Andoni writes:
Barack Obama, the US president, has still not fully grasped the essence of the revolutions underway in the Arab world. He genuinely seems to believe that the people rallying for democracy in the region are making a pro-Western, if not pro-Israeli, statement.
“All the forces that we’re seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel – if we make good decisions now and we understand sort of the sweep of history,” Obama recently told a group of Democrats in Florida.
I am not sure how Obama drew this conclusion, but he is either terribly misinformed or engaged in a serious bout of wishful thinking.
His statements, however, echo the assessments of many American pundits, some of whom have been celebrating the fact that anti-Israeli or American slogans have not dominated the recent and ongoing uprisings.
It is true that the protesters are not focusing on Israel.But to say that these forces could be natural allies of Israel and the West is to take a huge leap into a highly inaccurate assessment of the situation. The US president is misreading the message of the protesting Arab masses.
The Washington carcasses are traped in a decaying closed bubble. The World outside it is moving fast and independently of it.
Obama doesn’t necessarily believe what he says….consider who he was saying it to….the heavily Jewish dems in Florida. He naturally isn’t going to say it’s bad for the Jews and Israel.
It is unimportant what Obama believes. He is a politician and you will never know what he believes and can only know what he DOES if he does it in public. (I used to say, that I really respected Arafat, but then had to pinch myself and remind myself that he was a politician, after all.) What he says is either what he wants others to believe he believes or, maybe, a signal of what he will try to MAKE HAPPEN. The USA is not without power, even if Obama is a puppet of the MIC, AIPAC, etc.
In my opinion, the last sentence of this article – “unless, of course, Obama is simply hoping to use this flawed reasoning to justify the continuation of equally flawed policies in the region” – is the most likely reason behind Obama’s pronouncement.
Obama’s busy; since he can’t make himself white and quell the racism of a lot of Teabaggers, he’s trying to make himself invisible. He makes speeches in such a way as to give the impression to TV viewers that it’s just some infomercial so they might as well surf around for some other channel on which to see news. Right now he’s sitting in the Oval Office waiting for his Fairy Godmother to perform a miracle and switch the 1.5 million jobs US corporation created abroad with the Federal bail-out funds to domestic jobs before election day. Until then, he wants people to forget the assured Bright Knight coming to save America as we all saw him on election day. He apparently read the Meirsheimer&Walt book, THE ISRAELI LOBBY, and he’s taken it to heart as has Jimmy Carter, who went quiet so they don’t destroy his son’s political career. Meanwhile, the majority of American Jews are standing there in dispair asking: God, when will you send us a goy president with cohones who’ll save Israel by forcing it to abandon its Greater Israel mania?
Oops, I shouldn’t mention pro-Israel control of the media and Congress lest I get called “anti-Semitic” (sic). I should just quote JJ Goldberg’s book, JEWISH POWER!
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s more spaced out, Obama or Qadaffi!