(Published in WireTap)
As he engages the Islamic world, President Obama has gone to considerable lengths to distinguish himself from his predecessor in tone and language. He has made express rhetorical overtures several times during his first months in office: in his first interview with an Arab news outlet, the president repeatedly called for “mutual respect” with the Muslim world; in his address to Iran during its spring celebrations, he openly addressed it as the “Islamic Republic”; and in his visit to Turkey, he unequivocally stated that America “is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.”
Obama’s efforts to indicate a clean break with the past, however, only thrust into sharper relief one unchanged feature of American foreign policy that has for decades shaped the contours of Muslim resentment: unconditional support for Israel.
Prominent Americans alighting on this third rail of American politics have learned that it carries a stinging current. For daring to dissent, former CIA chief Michael Scheuer found himself booted from a university foundation, PBS journalist Bill Moyers was smeared by the head of the Anti-Defamation League, and Charles Freeman was bullied into declining an offer to chair the National Intelligence Council.
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen also found himself pilloried by hysterical neoconservatives, fresh off the conveyor belt from the “clash of civilizations” factory, after writing that Israel has “conveniently conflated” its local conflicts with American interests.
What prompted this flurry of attacks against dissenters is the presence of dissent itself—a rarity in either conservative or liberal America, where those questioning Israel frequently find the Damocles’ sword of the anti-Semitism label held above their heads.
These dissenters have not taken up their stance because they suddenly discovered that Israel was created through ethnic cleansing, or that it has killed thousands of civilians in absurdly lopsided “battles,” or that it uses civilians as human shields: none of this is new.
Rather, what prompts their concern is that America today views 1.5 billion people through the crosshairs of a tiny belligerent state, and that a quarter of humanity is staring back at us through the same jaundiced lens. The dissenters wisely asked themselves, “How does this benefit the United States?,” and came to the obvious conclusion: it doesn’t.
If Obama truly intends a realignment of America’s relationship with the Islamic world, the process will have to begin by decoupling the chariot of American policy from the warhorse of Israeli aggression.
Israel’s decision to mount its attack on Gaza as Obama took office is a vivid illustration of just how easily the president’s hopes for rapprochement can be suffocated in the rubble of Arab anger. Even the prime minister of Turkey, whose country houses Israeli warplanes, was so repulsed by the massacre that he stormed out of an international conference after arguing with Israeli President Shimon Peres, vowing never to return.
It was also revealing to see Shimon Peres make his own heckling and threatening “appeal” to Iran—which Israel is hankering to bomb—on the same day Obama issued his measured message, a blatant attempt to undercut the president that went largely unremarked upon here.
Worse still was the recent election of Israel’s right-wing government, which, as a New York Times Op-Ed contributor acidly observed, is more hostile to a peace agreement than Hamas. The new foreign minister, a grotesque figure who would not escape classification as a fascist in any other country, has proposed a “transfer” of Israel’s Arab population to the Palestinian ghettoes, demanded a loyalty oath from the state’s Arab citizens, and suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.
To propose rapprochement with Muslims while backing such a violently anti-Muslim regime is like extending an open hand with a scorpion in one’s palm.
In his appeals to Muslims abroad, Obama has accurately observed that Islamic extremists can only destroy, not create. Imagine how vividly he might illuminate that point for his intended audience if, as the president of the United States, he shields Muslims from Israeli violence while “Islamic” terrorists continue inflicting violence on their overwhelmingly Muslim targets.
It would be a clarifying moment in history—if the president has the courage to pursue it.
