Ron Radosh

June 5th, 2009 9:52 am

Obama’s Speech: How Should Conservatives View It?

I will be blogging later, and am preparing a major blog article on Klehr and Haynes’ book
Spies, and the response to it by panicked leftists. This may take the whole day to prepare, and I might not post it until tomorrow.

But, I did want to call attention to two very divergent views of Obama’s Cairo speech. The first, surprisingly, is by David Horowitz, at Frontpagemag.com. As you can see, Horowitz gives Obama an uncritical reading and has a completely favorable response. For a man who is usually as tough-minded as they come, this time David fails to read between the lines, and responds to the power of Obama’s rhetoric. It is hard not to, if one watched the speech on TV and succumbed to his charisma and delivery. I am glad that David understands that if and when an American President with whom conservatives often disagree makes a powerful statement in defense of our nation, he should be supported. But I think that this time, a careful look at Obama’s speech reveals many examples of both moral equivalence and an approach that actually surrenders a great deal to America’s real enemies.

The contrary view, whose author took much time to reflect on the speech before setting down to write, is by Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Contrary to David, Satloff separates what he thinks is positive from what he believes is in fact quite dangerous. Not only does Satloff think that Obama offered an “implicit acceptance of political Islam,” he writes the following about Obama’s ideas on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

This parallelism was perhaps most artificial in the president’s discussion of the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While no impartial observer can dispute the hardship of Palestinian life, it runs counter to history to suggest that Palestinians have “suffered in pursuit of a homeland,” when, since 1937, Palestinian leaders have rejected no fewer than six proposals to achieve just that goal. Similarly, the president’s statement about Palestinians who “wait in refugee camps . . . for a life of peace and security” says as much about Arab governments’ indifference to their fate as the inability to reach a diplomatic solution with Israel. And the president’s drawing of a connection from the Palestinian conflict with Israel to the fight for civil rights in America or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa will be interpreted by many as an endorsement of the moral righteousness of the Palestinian cause, not — as he apparently intended — a call for strict nonviolence.

Contrast Satloff’s last sentence with that written by Horowitz, who argues that Obama “drew a parallel between the struggles of American blacks for civil rights and Palestinians. But unlike Condoleeza Rice who not too long ago drew the same parallel to aggrandize the PLO terrorists as civil rights activists, Obama drew a sharp and revealing line of distinction between them: “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.’ And that was really the core of Obama’s speech. It was a defense of America’s founding and America’s mission.”

I urge readers to read both Horowitz and Satloff in their entirety, and then decide who is right for themselves. As they say on Fox News, we report, you decide.

Update: Cathy Young blogs today on the same subject, and as usual, strikes her own original position. Her article can be found here: http://cathyyoung.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/parsing-obama/

NOTICE TO MY BLOG READERS: The book talk my wife and I gave two weeks ago in NYC is on Book TV- C-Span2- tonight at 7 pm EST. We talk about our new book, “A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.” Posted on Sunday, June 7.

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8 Comments

1. David Thomson:

“an empathetic description of Palestinian life under “occupation” as “intolerable”; a blunt call for a “stop” to Israeli settlements; and an affirmation of U.S. support for, and his own personal commitment to, Palestinians having a “state of their own”

—Robert Satloff

Robert Satloff provides a vastly superior analysis than David Horowitz. Barack Obama does not have a clear understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if he perceives the latter as victims of an intolerable occupation. The Palestinians are responsible for their own plight. They free chose to be anti-Semites and persist in picking abysmally awful leaders. The Palestinians are in need of some “tough love” and not sentimental, excuse making gibberish.

David Horowitz is normally a profound thinker. I have often praised his many books—and own about ten of them. Furthermore, I make a point to visit the wonderful Front Page Magazine blog on a daily basis. Horowitz seems, however, unable to be rational concerning Obama. He instead appears to be something of guilt tripped white dude. The fact that Obama is a man of color overwhelms him. A short time ago, Horowitz also argued that mortgage industry crisis had little to do with the government forcing lenders to provide mortgages to minorities possessing poor credit histories. Thomas Sowell’s newest book, The Housing Boom And Bust, contradicts Horowitz’s bewildering view of the matter. It is a must read.

The Barack Obama phenomenon is all about his taking advantage of white guilt. This is the number one reason why such an intellectually shallow and inexperienced man is president of the United States. A white candidate would not have survived the early rounds of the Democratic Party’s selection process. We are now royally screwed.

Jun 5, 2009 - 10:57 am 2. Michael Hess:

“This is the number one reason why such an intellectually shallow and inexperienced man is president of the United States. A white candidate would not have survived the early rounds of the Democratic Party’s selection process.”

Nothing but pure racist drivel. I’m sorry I stumbled upon this site.

Jun 5, 2009 - 7:28 pm 3. jw:

Satloff is right. There is no similarity between the situation of Negroes in the United States and that of the Arabs who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. President Obama’s history is, as usual, defective. The United States, in a bitter civil war, ended slavery in 1865. The racial segregation statutes in the southern states were gradually struck down in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Arabs (i.e. Muslims) have been fighting Jews in the old Palestine Mandate since 1920, originally under the leadership of Haj Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, later ally of Adolf Hitler. The dispute is one of religion.

Jun 5, 2009 - 7:36 pm 4. David Thomson:

“President Obama’s history is, as usual, defective.”

President Barack Obama never intensely studied history. And what does he know personally about racial discrimination? Obama was born on August 4, 1961 and was therefore sixteen years old by 1977. There is something very important that guilt tripped and gullible whites should know: most of America’s racial troubles were effectively over by that time! Also, Obama was living in the multi-racial and multi-ethnic state of Hawaii. The deep South was utterly alien to this fairly affluent teenager. Obama was never a “victim.” On the contrary, he appeared to be something of indulged yuppie living the good life and without a care in the world.

Jun 6, 2009 - 10:23 am 5. Carl Sesar:

I also have read a good many of David Horowitz’s books with admiration and pleasure, and can’t understand what’s what with him in his takes on Obama. Anyway, here’s a link to Melanie Phillips well worth reading:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3670626/obama-in-cairo.thtml

Jun 6, 2009 - 1:25 pm 6. Jake Nelson:

George Washington on Israel

“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” ~George Washington Farewell Address

“The nation which indulges toward another habitual hatred or habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interests.” ~ George Washington

“Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Jun 6, 2009 - 6:11 pm 7. Suztours:

Michael Hess (#2) – while you might not believe or understand this, I know many white Americans who voted for Obama simply because he is black… out of a sense of guilt or because they decided it was time. Whatever the reason, they didn’t do their homework on him and just accepted that whatever he said during the campaign would change to what THEY “hoped” he would do, and still they voted for him ONLY because he is black… call that racism if you will. I call it stupidity.

David Thomson is completely accurate in his assessment – a white man with the same sort of background and campaign rhetoric would NOT have made it past the Democrat primary, much less been elected president.

Jun 7, 2009 - 2:47 am 8. dan:

Ah…. so we see that the purpose of Jack Nelson’s post was to demonstrate his inability to distinguish propaganda from reality, past or present.

Why don’t you just say you’d like Israel annihilated, Jack? Is it so hard to do that?

Jun 8, 2009 - 2:01 pm