by Winston Pickett

June 18, 2009

It was always a safe bet that after months of preparation and hype, President Barack Obama’s “New Beginnings” speech to Muslims around the globe was going to make a splash. Unfortunately for America’s telegenic and hyperactively ambitious chief executive, most of the reaction from the pro-Israel advocacy sector and commentariat was less than enthusiastic. No sooner had the White House zapped the 6,000-word text of his speech out on the Internet than everyone from analysts to armchair policy wonks began parsing his words with all the avidity of daf yomi readers.

Obama’s speech was deemed weak on specifics, utopian in its vision, simplistic in its characterisation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and dangerous in its hints at moral equivalence between the Palestinian dilemma, America’s civil rights movement, and the South African struggle against apartheid.

What the punditocracy failed to recognize is that President Obama hadn’t crafted his presentation exclusively for their consumption. No sooner had the cameras captured this living embodiment of an emergent American multicultural exceptionalism stepping up to the podium of Cairo University than the White House’s www.america.gov dispatched the text in 13 different languages, in millions of text messages, and as a video made available to some 20 million Muslim Internet users.

It is precisely this framework that made Obama’s words on anti-Semitism stand out.

As readers of Obama’s Dreams From My Father will corroborate, a sizeable measure of Obama’s identity struggle and formation was forged from a battle against negative stereotypes — white, black, Muslim, or American. Thus there is a ring of authenticity to his plea — early in his Cairo speech — to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear” and to his similar call to Muslims to refrain from reverting to “crude anti-American stereotypes.”

This theme reached its climax when Obama focused on Jews, Israel, and Holocaust denial — the most hard-core, virulent, and insidious anti-Semitic stereotype of our age.

Why was his choice of themes critical? Because behind every canard that Jews “manufactured” the Shoa or collaborated in a Holocaust “hoax” or — by way of a conceptual offshoot — that Israel and its supporters today are “behaving worse than the Nazis,” there resides a latent desire that the Jewish state not exist at all.

Obama understands this invidious logic, exemplified by his almost brutal formulation: “Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong….”

That also explains why Obama declared he would visit Buchenwald the next day: to bear witness to an ineluctable fact and to direct his message at Iran’s leadership and at everyday Muslims who are drip-fed the belief that the course of Israel’s history or the trajectory of Jewish nationalism (Zionism by any other name) are an outright lie.

The next day, at one of the gates to what eyewitness Alexander Donat once referred to as the “Holocaust Kingdom,” Obama uttered words that were more pointed still. He referred to his visit as “the ultimate rebuke” to the claim that the Holocaust never happened and “a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.” (Note the use of the possessive pronoun: our history.)

Were Obama’s words on anti-Semitism paradigm-shifting? Perhaps not to Western ears. But to the Arab world — and as a future marker by which to measure America’s global commitment to counteracting the world’s “oldest hatred” — they were significant indeed.

Winston Pickett is the former director of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. He lives in Brighton, England.

Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com

--TOP--