Obama's hearts and minds trifecta
By Donald K Emmerson
United States President Barack Hussein Obama's speech last week in Cairo, the
second stop on a three-destination diplomatic tour to win Muslim hearts and
minds, was outstanding.
First, it opened daylight between the US and Israel. Israeli settlements on the
West Bank are impediments to a two-state solution and a stable peace with
Palestine, and Obama did not split hairs. He did not distinguish between
increments to existing settler populations by birth versus immigration with or
without adding a room to an existing house. "The United States," he said, "does
not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
The American Israel Political Affairs Committee, which advertises itself as
"America's pro-Israel lobby", cannot have been pleased to hear that sentence.
But without some semblance of independence from Israel, the US cannot be a
credible broker between the two sides. It is not necessary to treat Israeli and
Palestinian actions as morally equivalent in order to understand that both
sides bear responsibility for decades of deadlock.
New settlements and the expansion of existing ones merely feed Palestinian
suspicions that Israel intends permanently to occupy the West Bank.
But Obama's criticism of Israeli settlements did not prevent him from also
stating flatly that "Palestinians must abandon violence" and he did not pander
to his audience. The most effective discourse on controversial topics involving
Islam and Muslims is both sensitive to feelings and frank about facts, as I
argue in a forthcoming book. [1]
Inter-faith dialogues that rely on mutual self censorship - an agreed refusal
to raise divisive topics or speak hard truths - resemble sand castles. Empathy
based on denial is unlikely to survive the next incoming tide of reality.
Respect without candor, in my view, is closer to fawning than to friendship.
As Obama put it in Cairo, "In order to move forward, we must say openly to each
other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind
closed doors ... As the Holy Koran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak
always the truth'." His listeners applauded - most of them, perhaps, because he
had cited their preferred book, but some at least because he had defended
accuracy regardless of what this or that book might avow.
In the "partnership" that Obama offered his audience, "sources of tensions"
were not to be ignored. On the contrary, he said, "we must face these tensions
squarely". He then followed his own advice by noting that extremists acting in
the name of Islam had killed more adherents of their own religion than they had
Christians, Jews or the followers of any other faith. In the same candid vein,
he noted with disapproval the propensity of some Muslims to repeat "vile
stereotypes about Jews", the opposition of Muslim extremists to educating
women, and the fact of discrimination against Christian Copts in Egypt, the
very country in which he spoke.
Third, his speech was notable for what it did not contain. The word
"terrorism", often used in the Manichean rhetoric of former president George W
Bush, did not appear once. In Washington, in his January 26, 2009, televised
interview with al-Arabiya, Obama had used the phrase "Muslim world" 11 times in
44 minutes - an average of once every four minutes. In the run-up to his Cairo
speech, the White House had repeatedly hyped it as an address to the "Muslim
world". Yet in the 55 minutes it took him to deliver the oration, the words
"Muslim world" did not occur, not even once. He must have been advised to
delete the reference from his text, and the excision strengthened the result.
Some say that 1.4 billion Muslims have too little in common to justify speaking
of a "Muslim world" at all. But the already vast and implicitly varied compass
of any "world" diminishes the risk of homogenization. One can easily refer to
"the Muslim world" while stressing its diversity. Many Muslims and non-Muslims
already use the phrase without stereotyping its members. No, the reasons why
Obama avoided the phrase were less definitional than they were political in
nature.
Had Obama explicitly addressed "the Muslim world" in Cairo, he would have
risked implying that his host represented that world, as if Egypt were somehow
supremely or quintessentially Muslim. That would have been poorly received in
the many other Muslim-majority societies that diversely span the planet from
Morocco to Mindanao in the southern Philippines.
Worlds apart
Several years ago a professor from Cairo's al-Azhar University, which
co-sponsored Obama's appearance, told me in all seriousness that Indonesian
Muslims, because they did not speak Arabic, were not Muslims at all. Obama did
not wish to be read by the followers of an ostensibly universalist Islam as
endorsing such a parochially Arabo-centric conceit.
The US president could, of course, have mentioned "the Muslim world" and in the
next breath denied that it was represented by Egypt, a country under an
authoritarian regime with a reputation for corruption. But it was far smarter
and more effective for Obama to shun the phrase altogether, thereby avoiding
the need to clarify it by insulting his hosts. That candid but insensitive move
would have potentially triggered nationalist and Islamist anger not only in his
Egyptian audience, but in other Muslim-majority countries as well.
Indonesian Muslims, for example, would have wondered with some apprehension
whether to expect comparable behavior were Obama to visit their country later
this year. Obama's audience at Cairo University was, instead, subjected to twin
eloquences of absence and silence - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's not
being present and Obama's not mentioning him at all.
Eloquent, too, was the absence of Israel from his itinerary. This was not a
sign of hostility toward Tel Aviv, a bilateral bond he referred to as
"unbreakable" - but an avowal that Washington on his watch would not limit its
foreign policy horizon to what any one country would allow.
Obama mispronounced the Arabic term for the head covering worn by some Muslim
women. The word is hijab, not hajib. But that small slip of the
tongue was trivial compared with the brilliance and timeliness of his speech.
Rhetoric is one thing, of course; realities are quite another. The tasks of
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum and improving relations with the
heterogeneous Muslim world are more easily discussed than done.
Illustrating the Muslim world's extraordinary diversity is the many and marked
differences between Turkey, where Obama spoke on April 6 on his first overseas
trip, his Egyptian venue two months later, and Indonesia, where he is likely to
visit in the months ahead. Before his choice of Cairo was announced, several
commentators advised him instead to give his "Muslim world" speech in June in
the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Rather than risk legitimating Mubarak's
autocracy, they argued, he should celebrate Indonesia's success in combining
moderate Islam with liberal democracy.
Following their advice, however, would have been a diplomatic mistake. Not only
did speaking in Cairo enable Obama boldly to address the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict from a podium close to its Middle Eastern epicenter. Had Obama instead
spoken from Indonesia, his visit would have been tainted by an appearance of
American intervention in the domestic politics of that country, where President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is up for re-election on July 8.
Earlier in his career, Yudhoyono completed military training programs at the
US's Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, and earned a master's degree in
management from Webster University in St Louis. No previous Indonesian head of
state has had a closer prior association with the US, and Yudhoyono's rivals
for the presidency are already berating him and his running mate as
"neo-liberals" who have pawned Indonesia's economy to the capitalist West.
Yudhoyono's popularity ratings among Indonesians are even better than Obama's
are among Americans. Obama was wise to postpone visiting Indonesia until after
its electoral dust has cleared and the next administration is democratically in
place in October. A gathering of leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation forum, which Obama is expected to attend, is conveniently scheduled
for mid-November in Singapore. He could easily visit Indonesia en route to or
from the event.
An Indonesian journalist interviewed Obama shortly after his historic speech in
Cairo. The president virtually confirmed this itinerary by saying that his next
trip to Asia would include Indonesia. He said he looked forward to revisiting
the neighborhood in Jakarta where he had lived as a child, and to eating again
his favorite Indonesian foods - fried rice, bakso (meatball) soup, and
rambutan fruit among them.
A trifecta occurs when a gambler correctly predicts the first three finishers
of a race in the correct order. Obama has apparently placed his diplomatic bet
on the sequence: Ankara - Cairo - Jakarta. There are still questions about
whether Obama's actions will match his words, and whether the US Congress will
go along with his policy prescriptions. But with two destinations down and one
to go, he is well on his way to completing a trifecta in the race for hearts
and minds in the Muslim world.
Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University.
He is the editor of Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism
in Southeast Asia (Stanford/ISEAS, 2008).
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