US-Muslim Relations One Year After Obama’s Cairo Speech
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
29 May, 2010
Countercurrents.org
From the moment President Barrack Obama, a powerful orator, took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. With his very positive rhetorical outreach in the early months of his presidency he raised a lot of expectations. On June 4, 2009 President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Cairo that elicited a near euphoric response from most officials and editorial writers across the Muslim World.
Not surprisingly, during 2009, the first year of his presidency, the approval-rating of American leadership increased by a significant margin in most Arab and Muslim countries when compared to 2008, George W Bush’s last year in office.
The numbers rose (according to Gallup June 1, 2009 polling) most impressively in Tunisia (from 14% to 37%); Algeria (25% to 47%); Egypt (6% to 25%); Saudi Arabia (12% to 29%); and Syria (4% to 15%). However, in Lebanon (25% to 22%) and Palestine (13% to 7%) they continued to fall.
During the last 17 months, Obama administration has taken a number of measures to woo the Muslim world.
1. The Obama administration is revising national security guidelines that strip references to “Islamic radicalism” and other terms deemed inflammatory to Muslims. President Obama and other administration officials stopped using terms like “Islamic extremism” shortly after taking office and are now purging “Islamic radicalism” from the National Security Strategy policy document.
The current National Security Strategy document, prepared by the Bush administration, states that “the struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” President Bush had gone further and used such meaningless terms as “Islamo-fascism” to justify his now doctrine of the war on terror and pre-emptive strike.
2. In April, Obama administration reversed guidelines that singled-out passengers on flights arriving from 13 Muslim countries, and Cuba, for mandatory screening. The guidelines were implemented in January 2010 after the attempted bombing of an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day.
3. Swiss-Muslim scholar Dr. Tariq Ramadan entered the U.S. for the first time in six years after being barred by the Bush administration. Dr. Ramadan, who has been critical of U.S. foreign policy, told the New York Magazine he believes Obama has shown he knows how to communicate with Muslims, but not much else. “Obama has the vision and the words, but does he have the power? This is problematic,” Ramadan said. “It seems he is limited.”
4. The Obama administration has dispatched American Nobel Prize winners to advise Muslims scientists, economists and other professionals on how to improve their research and better manage their institutions.
5. At the end of April, the U.S. government hosted a Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Doha, Qatar, with some 500 mainly Muslim entrepreneurs attending.
6. Obama's outreach has included appointing Deputy Associate White House Counsel Rashad Hussain as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. "As a hafiz [memorization student] of the Quran, he is a respected member of the American Muslim community," Obama said in the announcement. President George W. Bush first named a representative to the OIC in 2008 under similar objectives of outreach to the Muslim world.
However, one year after Obama’s widely-publicized speech in Cairo, Muslims remained skeptical about his administrations’ core policies towards the Muslim world, particularly the Arab-Israeli dispute. To borrow Radwan Masmoudi, President of the Center of the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID), the “hope and excitement in the Islamic world” that greeted Obama’s speech “began to turn into disappointment as people realized that turning promises into reality is not always easy or possible.”
Obama’s policy towards the Muslim world hinges on a number of major factors: the issue of Palestine; American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq; US drone attacks in Pakistan with heavy civilian casualties and the US policies towards Iran.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Muslims are disappointed by President Barack Obama's failure so far to advance Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking despite promising in his first days in office to make it a high priority.
Tellingly, during Vice President Joe Biden's last March trip to the region Israel announced new housing construction in East Jerusalem. Obama administration failed to press Israel to freeze settlement-building in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and thus pave the way to a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.
In short, no progress has been made since he took office. To the contrary, with the Benjamin Netanyahu government things have gotten worse for the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s refusal to stop settlement activities may be described as a major blow to Obama and George Mitchell’s efforts to build trust among the Palestinians and bring the Arabs to the negotiating table. There is very little sign on the horizon that we will see a breakthrough any time soon.
Addressing the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Doha Qatar last April, Obama assured his audience he would not abandon US diplomatic efforts. "Despite the inevitable difficulties, so long as I am president, the United States will never waver in our pursuit of a two-state solution that ensures the rights and security of both Israelis and Palestinians," he said.
But he offered no new initiative to revive the talks.
Not surprisingly, a recent public opinion survey published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, indicates that Palestinian hopes that President Obama will bring an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory have significantly declined in recent months. Only 9.9 percent of Palestinians now believe that Obama's policies will increase chances of achieving a "just peace," down from 23.7 percent in October last year and 35.4 percent in June.
While more than 32 percent of poll respondents now believe the peace process is dead - compared to 19 percent who believed so in February 2006 - almost 44 percent think peaceful negotiation is the best way to achieve Palestinian goals of ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state.
The number of those who saw armed struggle as the best way of ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank stood at close to 30 percent, while 22 percent preferred "peaceful popular resistance."
The poll, a random sample of 1,198 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was conducted last month.
Tellingly, even cosmetic criticism of Israel is not tolerable in the US congress. Two-third members of the House of Representatives have signed an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) letter calling for an end to the Obama administration’s public criticism of Israel.
Not surprisingly last year, 32 U.S. Senators urged the administration to take action to block the Gladstone Report of Israeli atrocities on Gaza from reaching the UN Security Council. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Senators also urged the Obama administration to denounce any punishment against Israel as a result of the report’s findings.
South African jurist Richard Goldstone led the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) investigation into the Israeli war crimes committed during December 2008 and January 2009 assault on Gaza. The 575-page report said: “Actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force. The report cited examples as shooting of civilians holding white flags, the deliberate and unjustifiable targeting of UN shelters and the killing of over 300 children whilst the Israeli Army had at their disposal the most precise weaponry in the world.
Goldstone said his central criticism of Israel is that its strategy intentionally applied disproportionate force in Gaza to inflict widespread damage on the civilian population. His report found that the Israeli air and ground attacks destroyed 5,000 homes; put 200 factories out of operation, including the only flour factory in the country; systematically destroyed egg-producing chicken farms; and bombed sewage and water systems. “If that isn’t collective punishment, what is?’’ Goldstone asked.’
Gaza, with 1.5 million Palestinian population, has been under a tight Israeli and Egyptian economic blockade since 2007 when the Hamas movement took over the territory after democratically elected in the 2006 elections. A convoy of cargo and passenger ships filled with supplies is currently attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Support of autocratic Muslim rulers
Another disappointment for the Muslims is Obama administration’s failure to advance democracy and human rights, especially in the Middle East.
In his most eloquent speech at the Cairo University, President Obama said: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.”
Tellingly, Obama chose to deliver this message in Egypt, which is ruled by one of the most oppressive regimes in the Middle East. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has clung to power since 1981 under emergency laws that allow him to imprison thousands of dissidents without charge or trial, and to stifle peaceful political activity. Interestingly, as a strategic ally of the United States, Mubarak’s regime receives nearly $1.8 billion a year in U.S. assistance, making it the second-highest beneficiary of American foreign aid after Israel.
The Obama administration maintains decades-old U.S. policy of supporting autocratic regimes — like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — in exchange for political acquiescence. Virtually all governments in the Middle East rely on vast secret police agencies to keep them in power, using the “war on terror” as a cover to silence any opposition.
In Pakistan, US maneuvered to install a client government of President Asif Ali Zardari, popularly know as Mr. 10 percent for extracting money from all big commercial deals. In August 2003, a Swiss Court found former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her widower, Asif Zardari, guilty of money laundering. Investigation Judge Daniel Devaud sentenced Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari to a six-month suspended jail term, fined them $50,000 each and ordered they pay more than $2m to the Pakistani Government. The case was related to an illegal six per cent of commission or bribe worth $12 million for awarding a pre-shipment customs inspection contract to two Swiss firms Societe Generale de Surveillance and Cotecna. The judge said they had illegally deposited millions of dollars in accounts in Switzerland and ordered the money be returned to Pakistan. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has ordered the government to reopen the corruption case against President Zardari.
Relations with American Muslims
In the aftermath of 9/11, the seven-million strong American Muslim community remained under siege and Obama administration’s measures have done little to make their life easy.
Despite healing words from President Obama about bridging the divide between the Muslim world and the West, America's Muslim community is subject to pervasive and persistent attacks by the federal government. The Arab and Muslim community has yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive FBI surveillance guidelines.
More than a year later, President Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency.
Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.
Since the Cairo speech, the administration has been confronted with the Fort Hood shooting spree in which Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and U.S.-born Muslim, killed 13 people, the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight en route to Detroit by a Nigerian Muslim, plus botched New York car-bombing by an American of Pakistani origin.
These incidents sparked bigotry against Muslims that highlighted the need for the administration to speak up for American Muslims.
In December last, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading Muslim civil advocacy group, sent a letter to President Obama to address an alarming level of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim hate in the United States. There has been no response from the administration.
Across the Arab and Islamic world, the change in style is measured against the substance of U.S. policies. Foreign opinion polls repeatedly confirm the link between the U.S. image and U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, Obama’s positive rhetoric was not followed by with concrete policies. Instead of making any substantial change in the traditional US policies in the Muslim world, Obama administration has resorted to changing terminology.
While President Obama should be congratulated on his efforts to change the discourse of US policy towards the Muslim world, it is clear that people expect more than new policy statements from him. To borrow Khaled Hroub, Director of the Cambridge University Arab Media Project, the spurt of fresh air that US-Muslim relations enjoyed after Obama’s arrival in the White House is already somewhat musty; it could be exhausted even before the end of his period in office, and certainly after it.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com Email: [email protected]
