Democrats’ aversion for Nader’s spoiler role in past presidential elections might compel ignorance of his advise, especially when it was directed at the president elect, Barak Obama, only one day before the election on November 3rd. This open letter to Obama is focused on the Middle East and how Obama has made himself a obsequious darling of AIPAC, the now hard right wing handmaiden of the Likud party of Israel.
Thanks to Mark Elf of Jews sans frontieres for the heads up on this missed advise from a persona non gratis, who should probably be listened to more often.
Open letter to Senator Barack Obama
Dear Senator Obama:
To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity– not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.
You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an “undivided Jerusalem,” and opposed negotiations with Hamas– the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored “direct negotiations with Hamas.” Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote “Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state.”
During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 proposal to permit a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much shock and little awe.
David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly: “There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a President.”
Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single criticism of Israel, “of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli’s use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli’s assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its `legitimate right to defend itself.'”
In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the Israeli government’s assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on “the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with horrible bloodshed” in early 2008.
Israeli writer and peace advocate– Uri Avnery– described Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as one that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama “is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future– if and when he is elected president.,” he said, adding, “Of one thing I am certain: Obama’s declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people.”
A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of innocents.
Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled “Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama” (by Andrea Elliott), citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by Roger Cohen titled “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque.” None of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans– even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to “tumultuous applause,” following a showing of a film about the Carter Center’s post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
As just a reminder of what Obama promised AIPAC, here is his June 4, 2008 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC.
One wonders if Nader is being considered for a cabinet level position, given his position on the enemy’s list and Obama’s alleged penchant for keeping the opposition close at hand. If so, he would only remind Obama that American presidents don’t suck up. Or do they?
I’d rename this diary. Sounds like Naders doing the groveling to AIPAC. Perhaps: Nader to Obama: Don’t grovel to AIPAC.
Although the title was not mine, I do read “letter to Obama,” not Nader’s…letter.” But if it is not clear to everyone, then it was not a good title.
Thanks for the feedback.
Pen is right.
The title does NOT make it clear what the piece is about.
Okay, you got it, a revised less grammatically complicated title. As I said, the original was part of the article which featured the letter.
The revised title is much, much better.
There isn’t a syllable in that letter that I do not agree with 100%.
Obama can see the injustice. Now man up. Cicero would tell you…”The eyes of the world are upon you.”
We hope and pray that we have a real liberal here. That’s all I can say.
We clearly do not. What we DO have is a politician. So if you have not been prepared, as some of us have, for more of the same, prepare yourself now, ’cause that’s what we’re gonna get now that the campaign slogans are being retired.
I can get cynical about Obama’s pandering too. But I am still hopeful. Let’s wait until he is actually inaugurated and sets up his staff. Hillary I heard is having second thoughts. Would be a good time to appoint Bryshnev (can’t spell his name any longer) as foreign policy adviser. If Dennis Ross gets the job, then I’m with you on the pessimism.
Rahm Emanuel, as we know a militant Zionist, and hawk, was his first pick for one of the most powerful jobs in the government. Hillary, a long-time major AIPAC panderer who never saw a military action she did not enthusiastically cheerlead, was (as far as we know) his first pick for Secretary of State. These things, along with his own excessive pandering to AIPAC and Israel, and his behaviour toward the Palestinians, do not bode well.
Did you mean Brzynski? I have not hear any mention of his name, have you?
As Salunga stated, we can only hope for a human being, as opposed to a politician, given Obama’s overwhelming election. Obama has “political capital” and could put an end to this conflict, irrespective of Emanuel. We shall see just where Obama stands, eventually.
Obama’s election may have been overwhelming when it comes to electoral votes, but the popular vote is a different story, and it is difficult to interpret a 5% lead as endowing him with a great deal of political capital.
I think we should resign ourselves to the likelihood that what we have is a politician who appears to be more of a human being than most. That is probably the best we are going to do.
It’s 6.8% and growing.
That’s good. Still, not an overwhelming mandate.
I can’t figure out why it wasn’t a popular landslide. Racism, perhaps?
There seems to be a confounding of southern Republicanism, which has its source in racism, and racism per se. Shields, the PBS commentator, suggested that the 70+ vote of southern white males for McCain was directly attributable to lingering southern racism, the Civil War being waged all over again.
It’s still there, but since Obama, a Black candidate, did get elected, it would not longer seem to be factor it once was. More relevant are the votes of the Reagan Democrats, the white flight suburbanites, who were more concerned with voting against poor urban Blacks than Democratic principles.
Even the fact that Obama could get nominated is a testament to how far the country has progressed. However, it still has a long way to go.
Weirdly, I have heard that white people actually congratulated their black friends and colleagues after the election. The very fact that it occurred to white people to do that is an interesting commentary.
The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.
Historians cite the Civil War, Reconstruction and the damn near 100 year backlash over Reconstruction, Jim Crow.
Well, I certainly believe that the 40s-early 60s represent the Civil War II; the mid-60s-early 70s a Reconstruction II; and the mid-70s to now as the Second Backlash.
Have we settled the Civil War; moved to a Progressive Backlash of the Second Backlash; or simply moved to Civil War III?
I honestly don’t know.
And we never will know so long as racial bigotry is able to hide within the Republican party. But its effect is certainly being experienced: the white male party versus everyone else is no longer a winning formula. Minorities are retreating from cynicism and finding out that their votes can count and that they can make a difference.
Isn’t this really what the Obama election was all about? With the slight help of Bush, of course.
Liberal? I’m just hoping for a human being.
Yeah, no kidding. A reasonably mentally healthy human being would be a welcome change.
Me too. And I think that a lot people believe that that is what we did get. Let’s wait and see.