This appears to be the season of soaring rhetoric all over again. In fact, when US President Barack Obama stood up this week to speak in the town center of a little known Irish village from where his Irish ancestors on mother’s side had set out for the New World two centuries ago, he reminded many back home that the 2012 campaign had begun in all seriousness.
And when he addressed British lawmakers in a special session at the historic Westminster hall, a rare honor reserved to Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela, the US leader appeared to establish instant rapport with his audience, reminding many why the world had fallen in love with the man and his “audacity of hope” in the first place. Unlike the uneasy and cold reception offered to his reviled predecessor for obvious reasons, the “grandson of a Kenyan cook in the British Army,” as Obama chose to introduce himself to his upper-crest audience, this president was breathlessly awaited like an emperor and mobbed like a rock star. And of course there was much mutual backslapping as copious and inevitable tributes were paid to the so-called special relationship (although the Americans now choose to call it an “essential relationship!)
Beyond those nice photo opportunities, fine speeches and feel-good atmospherics though lies a reality that is less rose-tinted. The excessive and effusive celebration of the NATO’s role and the West’s so-called mission to promote freedom and democracy around the world cannot blind the world to the mess created by Western policies and double standards. The Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan claiming more than a million lives were not inspired by any noble ideals. Even the so-called terror war that the US and its Western allies have been waging for a decade wasn’t really the response to the “Islamist extremism” that it’s being made out to be. It is the inevitable consequence of decades and centuries of imperial hubris and injustice.
The wound inflicted on the Holy Land by the West driving its original inhabitants out has turned into a cancer that is eating into the vitals of the Arab and Islamic world. The Palestinians have been persecuted, abused and humiliated like no people have been in recent history. In fact, as many in Europe and around the world are finally beginning to realize, it’s this festering conflict that is at the heart of the tensions between the West and Islamic world. Yet notwithstanding the repeated talk of seeking a “new way forward” with the world’s Muslims, the US and its Atlantic allies have been unable — or unwilling? — to act decisively to tackle the problem that is their gift to the Middle East.
In fact, even as Obama was pontificating to his Irish cousins about America’s enduring commitment to freedom, democracy and dignity for all, Israel’s Netanyahu was rubbing his nose in the US Congress by rejecting the same for the long persecuted Palestinians. And Their excellencies the members of Congress and Vice President Joe Biden lustily cheered him on. So instead of fussing over their “special relationship” and endlessly talking about their gift of democracy and freedom to the world, the US and UK (and Europe) should perhaps mend their ties with the rest of the world and back their rhetoric with action for a change. – Arabnews
