When Obama ‘Talks to Our Enemies,’ What Will He Say?
I am not sure why it seems surprising that Senator Barack Obama’s church has embraced Palestinian rejectionists. First the church newsletter reprinted an editorial by Hamas’s deputy political bureau chief, and then there was the “Open Letter to Oprah from Ali Baghdadi on her visit to Palestine,” where Baghdadi recommends the talk show hostess make a visit to the birthplace of Mary’s “beautiful Palestinian baby” (aka, Jesus), and describes an “ethnic bomb” Israel was developing in tandem with South Africa that would kill only “blacks and Arabs.”
The essential contours of the Islamist worldview are hardly alien to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s flock. There’s the knee-jerk anti-Americanism (the Islamists’s “Death to America” and Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America”), and Wright’s use of the Arab world’s chestnut that America brought 9/11 on itself with its support of Israel. And the historical revisionism holding that the Jewish child of Jewish parents (and a Jewish God) is actually a “Palestinian” is consistent with the identity politics of Black Liberation theology.
But what’s really telling are the flights of paranoid fancy — like how Wright said that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, that Bush was going to plant WMD in Iraq just like the Los Angeles Police Department frames suspects, and, most notoriously, that the U.S. government created HIV to kill “colored people.” The idea that the Jews were working on an “ethnic bomb” partakes of a genre that combines historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy. “But Daddy,” an alert sixth-grade biology student might query her well-educated father, “my teacher says you can’t build a weapon that only targets one kind of person.” Never mind the science, honey, we’re here for the sermon.
Conspiracy theories, along with anti-Semitism, are the defining characteristic of contemporary Islamist discourse. Consider this passage from the Hamas Covenant holding Zionists responsible for all of modernity’s evils:
[The Zionists] were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution. … With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
For Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, the conspiracy theory is not a “paranoid style,” but is rather its principal narrative; it is how the tribal leaders explain the potency of the enemies’ idols. Because of their magic, our tribe will suffer until our gods act on our behalf, for our lives are dependent on them. Since our lives are not free, all we can do is placate our gods in such a way — e.g., drive those not of our tribe from land our gods consecrated for us — that will make them favor us once again. In a pre-political society, where man believes himself incapable of changing his own condition through his own actions, grievance is how man describes his relations to other men. All of his hope is invested in his attitude towards his gods.
In a secular society like ours, on the other hand, the conspiracy theory is evidence of the efficiency of secularism and the fundamental health of the society. After all, the separation between religion and the state reflects the larger distinction we make between the eternal and temporal realms, which, in according respect to both faith and reason, makes it possible for men to worship freely in one and act rationally in the other. However, the conspiracy theory transgresses these boundaries as it proposes magical narratives about the public sphere, where competing interests, as well as venality and incompetence — i.e., the messy stuff of human intercourse — suffice to explain why things often go wrong. The conspiracy theorist, in seeing mysterious forces at work everywhere, floods the political realm with the magic that receded from it with the death of kings. So long as the conspiracy theorist is kept on the margins of a secular society, the political sphere is essentially sound.
Reverend Wright’s sermons are signs of a bewitched mind, and Senator Obama’s apologia treated them as though they should initiate a discussion among the citizens of the nation that his deeply troubled preacher assailed. Senator Obama thinks that Wright’s ravings merit a national discussion on race, but there are other concerns that will not only take up much of the American president’s time, but will also constitute the issues that the executive branch actually has control over — like foreign policy. What sort of insight does the Wright affair give us into an Obama foreign policy?
Obama says that he will talk to parties hostile to the U.S. because he does not think it is a reward to talk to your enemies. It’s worth noting that a man who claims that his biological identity and upbringing give him unique insight into the rest of humanity has here adopted the default position of the U.S. policy-making establishment, or that segment of it tacking against the Bush administration.
What’s unique about Obama, we now recognize, is that the notion of “talking to your enemies” is not just a diplomatic cliché. He will indeed hear out the obscurantist regimes that plot against U.S. citizens, allies, and interests, just as he sat still while his obscurantist preacher fulminated against “white America.” Will he manage to persuade his interlocutors in Tehran and Damascus to modify their behavior in Iraq, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, Israel, and the Palestinian territories? Of course not. He was incapable of convincing a man he has known for two decades, who married him and baptized his two daughters, that his employer, the government of the United States, did not create HIV to kill African Americans.
Senator Obama’s campaign has recently explained the principles of the candidate’s foreign policy in terms of “dignity promotion.” Critics say it is nothing more than another fuzzy slogan from a campaign that still doesn’t know what it stands for. But that’s not quite right, for the Obama campaign is vague only to those who refuse to take seriously what the senator and those closest to him — his wife, his preacher, and his foreign policy advisers — openly profess. The candidate appeals to many Americans who agree that the United States deserves to be taken down a peg or two, not just because of Iraq, or Guantanamo, or for failing to sign the Kyoto protocols, but because of historical grievances, like slavery — what Senator Obama called this secular republic’s “original sin.” America is too powerful, too arrogant, and needs to be humbled, and Obama is the man to do it, for the sake of the rest of the world.
People around the world do not have dignity because they are suffering from humiliation. And they are humiliated because they have grievances, and their grievances, as we know very well, are with U.S. policies. The author of this Washington Post editorial, Shadi Hamid, finds Obama’s message of addressing grievances hopeful:
Beyond the small hardcore of terrorists who slaughter innocents are tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims who sympathize with the terrorists’ anger but disagree with their means of expressing it. This is not some nebulous group. It’s people like my relatives in Egypt, who repeatedly tell me that we deserved Sept. 11. People like my friends in Egypt and Jordan, who feel that in my Americanness I have betrayed my brethren, the oppressed, and the humiliated. …We can articulate a new strategy, one which, without condoning violence, acknowledges their grievances and their very real sense of being wronged by history.
Instead of condemning violence, we need to contextualize murder and those who celebrate it, just like we have to understand Reverend Wright’s racist paranoia within the framework of “original sin.” By addressing the wrongs of history we can restore dignity and minimalize grievance.
“I don’t think anyone in the foreign policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, who is apparently still of the Obama campaign if no longer in it. And as Obama made clear in his Wright speech, no one running for president understands the depths of grievance like he does. An Obama presidency is not going to give us a national discussion on race, but a foreign policy that is a four-year-long international conference on grievance, for the world has many grievances with America.
Lee Smith is a Washington, DC-based writer and visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. He’s a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard on Middle East issues.
Photo courtesy of Zombietime.
I find it optimistic to forsee a potential Obama presidency as a four-year-long international conference on grievance. Were that is would be only a whine-whine-whine fest (apologies to Jerry Lee Lewis). For Obama to take the United States “down a peg or two” speaks to what concerns me: a concerted attack on the economic and social well-being of all Americans.
“the notion of “talking to your enemies”
It would perhaps be more accurate to describe the notion as “apologizing to your enemies.” “Barry” Obama will tell them the United States is an imperialist nation that has long filthed on the dark skin people of the World. We are deserving of their murderous rage. He will grovel before our enemies and offer them “reparations.” At the end of the day, Obama will inadvertently increase the danger to America’s citizens. He will worsen an already bad situation.
What will he say? “Here’s the keys and the DEFCON pass-codes and even my access-card to the White House back door. Just don’t tell anybody where you got them…”
I am also quite concerned over who Obama would share our technologies and secrets with, particularly those related to satellite communications, weapons and security systems. Obama is not an American, but a globalist, as are many of his followers. I am appalled that so many consider him qualified to be a state legislator, let alone President of the United States. How far we have fallen…..
Since you guys can already see into the future please tell me what G.W. Bush’s legacy will look like in 10 years.
…where Baghdadi recommends the talk show hostess make a visit to the birthplace of Mary’s “beautiful Palestinian baby” (aka, Jesus)…
Here’s a funny vignette for Mr. Baghdadi and all those who would distort for purposes of effecting a personal agenda…
An ingenious example of speech and politics occurred recently at the U.N. and made the world community smile.
A representative from Israel began-’Before beginning my talk I want to tell you something about Moses. When he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, ‘What a good opportunity to have a bath!’ He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished. A Palestinian had stolen them.’
The Palestinian representative jumped up furiously and shouted, ‘What are you talking about? The Palestinians weren’t there back then.’
The Israeli representative smiled and said ‘And now that I have made that clear, I will begin my speech.’
People like my friends in Egypt and Jordan, who feel that in my Americanness I have betrayed my brethren, the oppressed, and the humiliated.
Yawn.
When Shadi Hamid (et al.) take an up close and personal look at Egypt’s and Jordan’s (and Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s and Hamas’ and Hezbollahs’ etc.) betrayal (actually dismissal) of their own “oppressed”, I’ll start paying attention to such complaints.
Maybe
I don’t think there has ever been a worse candidate, so close to winning the Presidency, than BO.
Andrew asks about the President’s legacy in the next ten years–That’s probably too short a time–it usually takes a generation or so for historians to make such judgments. With that caveat in mind, here are my predictions: GW Bush = Harry Truman; Bill Clinton = Warren Harding…As always, YMMV, and neither of us will live to see our predictions borne out.
Obama is a racist, a liar, and a traitor. He is likely the most radically left politician ever to become President. Are we really about to elect an anti-American President? Have we fallen that low?
An Obama presidency would be the greatest security risk imaginable for the US. It would take a hundred years to undo the damage.
the usual nonsense of those who believe that the GOP under Bush has led this nation to greatness. check out and see what your homes are now worth; check the deficit; check the state of our military; check job loss; check inflation and gAs prices and on and on and on…
MCain is but a shadow of Bush, a kissing cousin, who can not tell me about foreign policy experience when he does not know anything about Iran, Al Qaeda, or the 3 major groups in Iraq!!!he thinks they are simply all arab/muslims…and he is to lead our nation?
You can tell the Bush legacy right now! We will continued to mired in Iraq. We will continue to wait for the Iraq armed forces to be self-sustaining; we will run up further deficits, and the economy will be held against him. That is clearly his legacy. What would it be that is positive?
RJA, Jim, I second both your “motions.”
Amazing when ya think of it. We’ve never had a President other than a white male of northern European descent, and suddenly we’re thisclose to being led by the son of an African Muslim who spent a good deal of his formitive years being raised by an Asian Muslim in a Muslim nation.
As he told an Iowa crowd a few months ago “The day I’m inaugurated, I think this country looks at itself differently, but the world also looks at America differently, because I’ve got a grandmother who lives in a little village in Africa without running water or electricity; because I grew up for part of my formative years in Southeast Asia in the largest Muslim country on Earth.” The quote is from here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112802757.html
I’m sure the world will “look at America differently” once he’s elected. And that’s unfortunate.
Andrew: It may take more than 10 years for recognition but GWB will be seen as freeing 50 million people from tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan. He will be seen as the guy who stopped Kadafi’s terror program and who stopped the Pakistani Khan from exporting nuclear technology. He will be seen as the guy who decreased terrorism by fighting jihad and by helping Iraq transform into a prosperous, democracy, a model for people in the surrounding countries. And he will have turned Iraq into an American ally.
Barack Obama’s habit of obscuring his true self and true intentions reminds me of Max Plank’s first attempt to scrutinize the atom. Plank bomabarded a sheet of gold with radiation, and got his answers in the reflected light that appeared on the other side.
Rev. Wright is the radiation to Obama’s sheet of gold, his wife Michelle and Samantha Powers are that reflected light.
Obama is not a racist but against it .who ever practice that word is not hearing him/her self becouse this kind of decease is the one ,that the world leaders might already eridicate in this oplanet we live, rather then any other decease , thanks to world leaders they already parcially , fanished the commanism, hunger , traplism , pa,thism , itc.but still there is the one , the worst of all,racism, the father of slavery, so far no religion sent by God to the human is making ligitimate of doing in this racism while its still axcisting and getting more clients who practising among the 6 pillion people in this unaverse, however, its still running in human vains and heating , I think Its the Time we would get a kind of medicine_ just any kind_from this decease
“”"”"the usual nonsense of those who believe that the GOP under Bush has led this nation to greatness. check out and see what your homes are now worth; check the deficit; check the state of our military; check job loss; check inflation and gAs prices and on and on and on…”"”"”"
Really don’t know if Bush has “led us to greatness,” but his harshest oponents would lead us to humiliation. It’s funny to hear critics of Republicans going on about the deficit like they themeselves believe in fiscal responsiblity. The housing crisis is in part the fault of greedy fools who bought a 500K house when they could only afford a 350K one, and homes in general have been grotesquely over-valued for decades. For a military under serious strain, it is doing an incredibly good job under the circumstances and constraints, and the critics who go on about “the state of the military” only intend to gut it further so they can use the money to bail out irresponsible home-owners and create giant pork-barrel projects to bribe voters with. Our unemployment levels — even with “job loss” — are way lower than those in Europe. The low inflation rates we’ve enjoyed for two decades were due to Republican-led economic policies. The higher inflation rates are due to a Democrat-led Congress’s stupid act of encouraging the turning of grain into fuel instead of food. The higher gas prices are because — instead of drilling for more domestic oil, of which there is plenty, and allowing the creation of more refinery capacity — we’re trying to run our cars on corn.
And, by the way, at no point did you come out and say that these were good reasons to elect Obama. Is therre something else you want to share with us?
“the usual nonsense of those who believe that the GOP under Bush has led this nation to greatness. check out and see what your homes are now worth; check the deficit; check the state of our military; check job loss; check inflation and gas prices and on and on and on…”
>My house is worth double what is was under Clinton.
>Gas is the same as it was under Jimmy Carter when adjusted for inflation, despite the growth of two new, huge industrial economies, China and India.
>Unemployment, 4.8% is lower now than an average of all the Clinton years.
>The military has successfully fought two wars on two continents with a minimal of casualties and loss to civilian life; much in contrast to WW2 or Vietnam, two wars fought by Democratic presidents.
>Inflation at about 3.3% is historically low.
So, tell me, what am I checking for…how good we have it?
At the time of this Presidency, Lincoln was widely hated and nearly thrown out of office oddly enough by “copperhead” Democrats who called the “Civil War”..Lincoln’s War and wanted it ended at any cost. Sound familiar?
He was ridiculed as ignorant and stubborn by the media.
Bush will be viewed in the same vein when the current 60′s era hippies die out in the media and academia. There will be wide spread amazement that he was able to rid the Middle East of two horrific regimes and free over 50 million people. The fact that he was opposed at every step by the world’s left will be analyzed endlessly and not very favorably.
But that is okay, like your hero’s, the American Democrats now claim about the 1st Gulf War, you can quietly claim that you were always in favor of his efforts. Or didn’t you know that Kennedy and Kerry both spent the entire 1980 opposing every Reagan effort and even reached out for assistance from the Soviets. Yet now they make claims of working along side Reagan!!
They did it with Reagan’s crusade against the Soviets and will do the same with Bush.
Here are my objections to Obama: a man who can find much to praise and very little to condemn in the preachings of Rev Wright while at the same time maintaining that a man like Imus has no place on the public airwaves is not the honest broker that he claims to be. In international affairs if there were a dispute between Uribe and Chavez, I think Obama would side with Chavez. If Bush and Castro appeared before an audience in Harlem, Castro would be cheered and Bush would be booed. Obama would sit quietly. There is a chasm between black and white sensibilities. Obama walks the tightrope with considerable grace and dignity. He is a decent person but I do not trust him to represent my interests.
Barry scares the crap out of me; the man is nuts; so is Hillary. I DO NOT want either of these clowns EVER picking up a White House phone up at 0300; I DO NOT want them going anywhere near the White House (except for tea/crumpets…but not too often), I DO NOT want either of them having their finger on ANYTHING…let alone the “button”, or any damned red phone.
That said, I ain’t to happy about John McCain either, but I trust the cagey, crusty bastard a lot more than these cheesy, socialist (could have used communist, but they weren’t that bad a bunch), failed hippies.
May God have mercy on this nation; it’s IGNORANT voters will screw us to the wall for decades.
Your question is irrelevant. It’s Bush fault that we have amassed so many enemies in last eight years. Under Obama we’ll have no enemies. Heard of kumbaya?
When Barack H*****n Obama is elected President, it’ll be payback time for whitey – bigtime.
If we are going to talk to our enemies, I want someone who’ll say the right things:
We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way.
Have you written your will?
Go ahead. Make my day.
the Audacity of Electing a “National Security Risk” to the highest office in the land, speaks volumes for the constitutional rights of self-loathing Americans willing to loose it all
…because I’ve got a grandmother who lives in a little village in Africa without running water or electricity
And another grandmother who lives alone and (reportedly) unwell in a condominium in Hawaii.
Running water AND electricity and, occasionally, useful as a foil to the Reverend Wright’s rants.
It’s Bush fault that we have amassed so many enemies in last eight years.
Eight years ? Good lord, I think we need to go back a little farther than just 8 years.
To a rather long litany of Islamic attacks on Americans and American interests.
Maybe, for purposes of argument, we could just go back 15 years to 1993 during Bill Clinton’s first term and the first Islamist attempt on bringing down the Twin Towers.
How short memory is.
let the democratic process work. in the end the president will be the one that american people chose. have faith in our solid democratic institutions.
“What would it be that is positive?”
Very simple. Bush doesn’t think that the best response to every crisis is automatic, abject surrender. That’s a rare virtue.
Gosh, how awful that everybody hates us because of Bush.
The Red Chinese hate us, when they’re not harvesting organs from political prisoners, poisoning everyone on the planet, and mowing down Tibetan monks and nuns.
The Europeans hate us, when they’re not surrendering to Islamists, cramming their nonwhite immigrants into slums, and selling arms to every butcher and despot there is.
The Africans hate us, when they’re not slaughtering each other, imposing famines on each other, poaching all their animals into extinction, and wallowing in permanent failure and corruption.
The Central and South Americans hate us, when they’re not clear-cutting their forests, murdering their indigenous peoples, and backsliding into failed socialist narcostates with gun battles in the streets, perpetual coups, dictatorships, and collapsed economies.
The Central Asians and Middle Easterners hate us, when they’re not throwing acid in women’s faces, burning down schools, rioting over cartoons, ethnically cleansing, raping, blowing up, skinning alive, murdering, and destroying irreplaceable art.
The U.N. really hates us, when they’re not kissing Islamist butt, condemning Israel, sending child-molester troops into Africa, helping tyrannies arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and lining their pockets with bribes.
What a shame that we’re so reviled! Save us, Obiwan Obama! You’re our only hope!
AMEN Tom W
Democrats have lever left their Copperhead ancestry. From the plantation to the collective to the madrassa, Democrat Copperheads are the best friends slavery had, has or will have.
Mr. Obama is a racist. He calls his grandmother a typical white person. Were one of us to say something about a “typical black person” we would excoriated by the media for being racists. He is playing the race card for all it is worth and basically telling us that if we don’t elect him, we will have riots in the streets.
His wife hates American, his pastor hates America, and you better believe he hates America. Do we really want that in a president?
Wish I would have read Tom W’s post first. He said it all much better than I ever could.
George Bush is going to be remembered as the guy who charged into the anti-Islamist battle bravely…but ultimately half-heartedly. If Iraq results in a stable quasi-democratic country, Bush’s ploy will be seen as a bold move and the messy, costly manner in which it was achieved will be forgiven if not outright forgotten.
Bush’s legacy on the domestic front will be considerably less burnished. His ‘big government conservatism’ (oxymoron that) will be seen as the beginning of another period of ostrasizism for the GOP, following eight years of fiscal irresponsibility that was previously their only differentiator from the left. If America wants big government–and we certainly seem to on evidence–then why go with the cheap immitation?
As somebody above said in a different way, those who dislike America and American policy all have their own messes to clean up. Moreover, anybody who believes that other countries don’t act selfishly in their best interests is a fool. Bush got part of the one big thing right: he took the war to the enemy. Everything else is important but nonetheless secondary.
We at least have one clue the “change” that Obama is planning for America. It’s selling us into slavery to the United Nations. He has his name on a bill in Congress to do just that.
Read Novelist Edward Cline’s article, “Barack Obama’s Global Poverty Act: Congressional Duplicity, or Treason?” here: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5152
He’ll probably tell them that being part Muslim, he understands their feelings, which they will intepret as “I am a fool,” and step up their processing of Uranium.
Yes, your list is a keeper, Tom W.
I’ve asked people before who bemoan that the United States is “hated” (or at the least disdained) would they please name the paragon(s) out there whose approval we should be seeking ?
Cuba ? Venezuela ? Iran ? …Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia…France ?
To date, no one has ever been able to give any kind of reasonable or satisfactory reply when asked for specifics.
They simply repeat that the US has lost “the world’s” approval.
Maybe we should seek “The UN’s” approval. You think ? There’s a sorry lot, increasingly manipulated itself by some of the baddest actors on the planet.
Obama talking to our enemies:
Ahmaldinejad: America is the Great Satan! The puppets of Jooooos! Your presence in the Middle East is evil! Americans have been working on our destruction for generations!
Obama – I understand your grievance Makmood, old buddy – and agree with you. I am here to listen and understand you. As a matter of fact, what you say resonates with me- it is what my pastor has been saying to me all these years. I’m not even proud of America.
Oh Please..conflating Obama’s refusal to put a father figure/pastor whose first sermon was about HOPE with wimping out to rogue leaders is absolutely intellectually dishonest. To your readers who depend on you to do some preliminary research of Obama’s speeches, interviews and position papers. Because if you did listen to interviews of Obama with the papers that have endorsed him where he’s not just spouting canned campaign rhetoric, you’d learn that Obama abhors the likes of the gas bagger in Tehran and the likes of American administrations in the last 50 years that propped up jerks like him all over the world.
Nobody likes to have their party or their candidate put down in these forums and God knows none of these current candidates are perfect. But just ask yourself if this country’s response to the 911 tradegy has made this country a safer, more free place to live and raise our children? Did we use our power and our might to start building mutually beneficial relationships around the world? Did we act on the root causes of terrorism by changing the policies that caused it, thus reducing the number of terrorists? NO is the answer to both questions. We did just the opposite. It’s ironic that our government keeps talking about protecting our freedom, but are we more free post 911 or less free? The terrorists have duped this administration into restricting American’s freedom, yours and mine, with the Patriot Act and Patriot II. The terrorists have read our leaders like a book. They attacked us and our economy with our own airplanes and then used our government to send more of us where they can be killed in this unnecessary war which further weakened our economy. Our children and our grandchildren will be paying for this war long after we are gone.
Don’t talk to me about Bush’s “legacy”. It’s being written in the bloody Iraqi soil and in the regulations of Homeland Security. Looks to me like the terrorists are winning.
After Pearl Harbor, Denny H would have had Franklin Roosevelt ask “….act on the root causes of attack on the US PAC Fleet by changing the policies that caused it…”
And, last time I checked, we were killing the terrorists in Iraq and not down town Manhattan. Better in Irzq than Des Moines, I say.
Obama had the gall in a speech the other day to tell the American people that other presidents also talked to our enemies, specifically mentioning Roosevelt and Truman.
He believes that Americans are simply too dumb to know for themselves about our own past history.
Yes both R and T did talk to our enemies in “demanding” unconditional surrenders and backed it up with war that in the end, changed the course of history for the entire world…see….war DID solve something O.
The only president that Obama could most closley compare himself too in talking to enemies is Jimmy Carter, and he would bear the same fruit that that weak president did.
Obama actually said it would be too “harsh” of a responce in using nukes on Iran if Iran nuked Isreal…not that anyone wants to see nukes zipping around, no sane person does but in him saying that it provides every tyrant and zealot out there a gigantic “footnote” in thier little black books on just what type of spinless person Obama is by dangerously and foolishly simply taking that option of the table, which may actually cause some whack job to feel he can let loose of a missle with no real repercussions.
Obama, dont mention Roosevelt and Truman in the same breath as your intentions of surrender and disengagment, you and them are from different worlds.