Barack Obama, next president of the U.S.?

[Talking Ass]

Barach Obama's Speech in Cairo

[Tomas]

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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... allery?ind

I like that first picture a lot. He looks like Jimi Hendrix or something.

Found the article on a whacko right-wing forum. The dude who posted the LA Times story said that Obama looked high...

[Carl G]

Barach Obama's Speech in Cairo

Barach ata adonai elohenu melech ha olam.

[mozila7]

Hello. how r u. do you peoples satisfied with the so far performance of presiden obama. dose it satisfactory enough?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

A Bush in sheep's clothing

[Diebert van Rhijn]

So where to start with change? Allowing competition that threatens the old hegemony to actually rise and develop, allowing them to gather strength for peace. A bit of healthy risk taking. Life is all about risk and change after all, only death is [imaginary] certain peace and status quo which like all dead things tend to rot at the core.

"...we need the international actors to refrain from intervening in internal Palestinian affairs. You should leave it to the Palestinians to resolve our differences peacefully. You should respect Palestinian democracy and its results," the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, said.

This latter was a reference to the hard-hitting campaign that Israel, the U.S. and its allies have maintained against Hamas ever since its candidates won a strong victory in the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s parliamentary elections in January 2006.

That campaign has included sustained efforts to delegitimize the Hamas-led government that emerged from the elections, attempts by Israel to assassinate the government’s leaders, including during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, and the mission that U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton has led in the West Bank to arm and train an anti-Hamas fighting force loyal to the U.S.-supported Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. - IPS

[Talking Ass]

Asalam alaikum Diebert.

Don't look for too much 'change', oh Esteemed Brother. The main lines have been drawn, and the main lines will be pursued. It is really a question of defeating and isolating the extremist edges, such as for example those with ideas and opinions like this dude in The Nation, and working the middle road. I'll bet you that the dominant sectors understand the issue of power-relations and, possibly, welcome a better rhetorical package. Obama weren't wearin' no cowboy hat! And Obama is an astounding rhetorician. He is almost mind-bogglingly good (good enough to be elected Anti-Christ if his presidency doesn't work out). The grand power(s) write the script, and the lesser powers make adjustments and cooperate with the order that is being established. Still, it is not so bad. Prosperity, education, women's rights, and some kind of settlement in Palestine where Israel is powerful and secure.

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!

(from The Tempest)
_____________________

Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicing die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I.

(from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World)

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The main lines have been drawn, and the main lines will be pursued. It is really a question of defeating and isolating the extremist edges, such as for example those with ideas and opinions like this dude in The Nation, and working the middle road. I'll bet you that the dominant sectors understand the issue of power-relations and, possibly, welcome a better rhetorical package.

There's nothing new here for a student of history. But didn't you notice then that extremism already got into those main lines? This transference was sort of completed around a decade ago. Of course the whole point is to present extremities as the new middle. The obvious result is the popping up of 'mirror' extremes like in a 'whack the mole' game. This wears out the 'dominant sectors' over time and it all ends in a soft whimper or a bloody massacre ('just war').

But enough of this merry go around: let the new long afternoon ice age begin!

[Tomas]

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Barack Obama condemns 'ignorant and hateful' Holocaust deniers

-snip-

In a thinly veiled attack on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who on Tuesday branded the Holocaust
a "big deception", he said the site was the "ultimate rebuke" to people who questioned the killing.

-Click URL for complete article-

http://curtmaynardsnewestblog.blogspot. ... arack.html

[Tomas]

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Ron Paul says Obama is as much of a Neo-con as Bush

Paul: The tone is different, but the policies don't change.

-Click URL for complete article-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen- ... 12520.html

[Tomas]

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Picture of Michelle Obama without her wig

http://www.nypost.com/photos/galleries/ ... hoto05.htm

[Talking Ass]

Comemtary on Obama's Speech in Cairo. (No link available).

First, the good bits in Obama’s speech in Cairo.

He told the Palestinians unequivocally that violence was wrong.

He said that there was an unbreakable bond between America and Israel.

He told the Arab states firmly:

The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel’s legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

He condemned the persecution of non-Muslims in the Islamic world and urged equal rights for Muslim women.

He referred to Iran’s role since 1979 in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.

Now the bad bits – and they were really bad.

He revealed gross ignorance of the Jews’ unique claim to the land of Israel. He said that America’s unbreakable bond with Israel was based upon the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust...

The Jews’ aspiration for their homeland does not derive from the Holocaust, nor their overall tragic history. It derives from Judaism itself, which is composed of the inseparable elements of the religion, the people and the land. Their unique claim upon the land rests upon the fact that the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of years – centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene. As for antisemitism, he made no mention of the alliance between the Palestinians and the Nazis during the 1930s, and the fact that Nazi-style Jew-hatred continues to pour out of the Arab and Muslim world to this day.

Worse, Obama appeared to draw a subliminal equivalence between the Holocaust extermination camps and the Palestinian 'refugee' camps:

Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.

And with this awful and revealing linkage, he duly segued seamlessly into the distorted Arab and Muslim narrative of Israel's history. It is not undeniable that the Palestinians 'have suffered in pursuit of a homeland' because it is untrue. The Palestinians have been offered a homeland repeatedly – in 1936, 1947, 2000 and last year. They have repeatedly turned it down. The Arabs could have created it between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied by Jordan and Egypt. They chose not to do so. They could have created it after 1967, when Israel offered the land to them in return for peace with Israel. They refused the offer. The Palestinians have suffered because they have tried for six decades to destroy the Jews’ homeland.

For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.

The ‘pain of dislocation’ was caused by the fact that six decades ago they went to war against the newly recreated Israel to destroy it, and were subsequently deliberately kept in ‘refugee’ camps by the Arab world. What other aggressors in the world are described as suffering ‘the pain of dislocation’ caused by their own aggression -- which has continued for sixty years without remission and shows no sign of ending?

Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead.

There is one reason for that and one reason alone – the Palestinians have ensured that Israel has never lived in peace or security, because they have continued to attack it and murder its citizens. And Gaza? Doesn’t Obama realise the Israelis no longer occupy Gaza? It is run by Hamas, which shows its commitment to the peace and security of its inhabitants by throwing them off the tops of tall buildings.

So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.

And what about the intolerable situation of Israel, forced to live in a state of siege for sixty years because of the unending aggression of the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Muslim world? The Palestinians could have lived in peace and prosperity alongside Israel at any time since 1948. If they were to end their attempt to destroy Israel and accept instead the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state -- that crucial qualification Obama omitted to mention -- they could do so tomorrow. The only reason their position is intolerable is because they themselves have made it so. What other aggressors in the world have their situation described as ‘intolerable’?

Palestinians must abandon violence.

Good. But then:

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.

‘Resistance’? 'Resistance' is a term of moral approval. ‘Resistance’ describes a fight against injustice. But the Palestinians have been engaged in an attempt to wipe out Israel. Obama sees this as 'resistance' – even though he says violence is wrong. And then this:

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. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia.

So Obama has equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the true resistance against apartheid in South Africa. Thus the moral bankruptcy of the moral relativist.

Next, he repeated that the settlements (all of them? just new ones?) undermined peace and so had to stop. But they don’t undermine peace. It is Arab rejectionism that prevents peace in the Middle East, and the settlements are a palpable excuse. Yet Obama delivered no ultimatum of any kind to Iran, the real threat to peace in the region and the world; indeed, he repeated that Iran should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an alarming indication that he might view as acceptable a formulation which might enable Iran to continue to make nuclear weapons under some kind of verbal and political camouflage.

For his egregious sanitising of Islam and its history, and his absurd claims about its contribution to western civilisation, read Robert Spencer here. But in this regard, one of Obama’s references in particular made me catch my breath. It was this:

The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

This is boilerplate misrepresentation by Islamists and their apologists. The fact is that it is Judaism which teaches this as a cardinal precept. The Talmud states:

Whoever destroys a single soul, he is guilty as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whoever preserves a single soul, it is as though he had preserved a whole world.

The Koran appropriated this precept – but altered it to mean something very different. Thus (verses 5:32-5:35):

That was why we laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind. Our apostles brought them veritable proofs: yet many among them, even after that, did prodigious evil in the land. Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.

In other words, this turns a Talmudic precept affirming the value of preserving human life into a prescription for violence and murder against Jews and ‘unbelievers’. Yet Obama passed it off as evidence of the pacific nature of Islam.

So in conclusion, yes, there was some positive stuff in this speech – but it was outweighed by the United States President's shocking historical misrepresentations, gross ignorance, disgusting moral equivalence between aggressors and their victims, and disturbing sanitising of Islamist supremacism.

In short, deeply troubling.

First appeared in Melanie Phillips' blog in The Spectator.

Many thanks to Melanie Phillips

[Dan Rowden]

All Jews should die, Alex.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Yes, on this depends the whole Gospel and Weininger too.

[Tomas]

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Obama invokes Jesus more than George W. Bush

His multiple mentions of Jesus seem to be somewhat at odds with this:

http://holycoast.blogspot.com/2009/06/o ... rge-w.html

[Tomas]

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The United States of Obama Has Arrived

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's statement on executive compensation
packages is a clear signal that a dictatorship has arrived in America.

But, the real meat is here:

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/20 ... rived.html

[Talking Ass]

Another opinion about Obama's speech

[Iolaus]

The fact is, all the scriptures of the west have a lot of terrible stuff in them. They are not consistent in their message. We can go over the Old Testament, the Koran, to a lesser degree the New Testament, and no doubt the Talmud and find really hideous stuff.

No doubt it is true that the Koran lifted a lot of its stuff from the Bible, and may have then distorted it. But when you really look at it honestly, the history and the teachings of Christianity are every bit as negative. We are in a different, hopefully better, phase of history. So I think that Obama is right to focus on the positive aspects of scripture, and I suspect he knows full well the negative side. But things get better when people choose to focus more on some things, than others.

[Talking Ass]

It seems to me that Obama is acting the part of an extremely competent lawyer-politician, fully in command of tip-top rhetorical skills. I imagine he has a certain respect for Christianity, parts of the Gospel narrative, ethical values, etc., but he cannot be unaware that his role is political. Underneath it all are all the facts of 'straight power politics' as Chomsky likes to say. It seems to me that he is, from a political perspective, doing a needed and necessary thing: speaking to Muslims in terms they can relate to, speaking to them as no one has spoken to them before. Meanwhile, all the power relationships and all the requirements of dominant power are still in place. There is a shift in tactics, but that is what lawyers and politicians do. Pure power politics and the ghost of Machiavelli are right there with him. Even if it were not true, and many think it isn't true, it is necessary to lie to the Muslim world by agreeing with some parts of their own lies. They are invested in seeing things (say Israel-Palestine) in a specific way, and we pretty much know what that is. Instead of fighting against that view, he strategically 'agreed' with some parts of it, which is what a good negotiator does. You have to validate the position of your opponent, you have to demonstrate that you hear them, that you empathize with them.

I can see why some Jews (and some Christians and many on the Right) were troubled by his speech, but I thought it was masterful.

But, in the great game of world affairs, there is no narrative worth a damn that doesn't have the element of danger, deception, treachery, lies, mayhem and death. You could trace the outlines of 'good and just action' and all the devils of the world would cackle, bury themselves underground and undermine all good work. At the bottom, and as always, are the hidden structures of power politics.

The plot thickens...

The fact is, all the scriptures of the west have a lot of terrible stuff in them.

I was interested in the Gideon Bible organization and found out that they have distributed 1.3 billion Bibles in the life of the organization. There are many billions of Bibles out there, and people read them avidly. They seem to find values there, and they don't say they are filled with 'terrible stuff'. So, there is a significant percentage of people---dumb people I suppose?---who find tremendous value in something you find no value in, or very little.

I've marked it down: Anna believes the Bible is more or less filled with terrible stuff. I've noted it. I think I understand why you feel that way. Certainly from your perspective you are right.

Now, let's nuke Australia!

[Carl G]

Obama, the U.S. puppet-in-chief, says what he is told to say. I don't see any use in pretending Obama himself stands for or against anything. It would be like believing that Charlie McCarthy stands for something.

[Talking Ass]

There is a certain amount of independence, as is obvious. But it is the same old power structure that determines the general course. In other ways, though, the independence of a president is pretty obvious, which is why many are reacting against Obama's policies. ('Socialism', universal health care, etc)

May Australia fry in Biblical, nuclear fires!

[Carl G]

How is Obama's quasi-independence obvious? How do we know that anything in the scripts he reads comes from him rather than from the power brokers who selected him and financed his ascendancy?

[Talking Ass]

You'd have to demostrate that he is simply receiving scripts, in the way that you imply. I suggest that you are ignorant of the manner in which major policy decisions are formed. There is a great deal of research and study that goes on behind the scenes in 'think-tanks', consulting with men who have dedicated their professional and academic lives to studying a particular issue or country, as well as industrial and economic advisors, etc. This is the Washington structure, and it is these people who walk up and down the halls of power. I would call it highly rational (the process of deciding policy decisions and shifts), and though it is obvious that private interests are also involved, this is true in all political systems.

The way you characterize Obama (and any president) isn't quite accurate, so it is not helpful to understanding.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

There is a shift in tactics, but that is what lawyers and politicians do. Pure power politics and the ghost of Machiavelli are right there with him. Even if it were not true, and many think it isn't true, it is necessary to lie to the Muslim world by agreeing with some parts of their own lies. They are invested in seeing things (say Israel-Palestine) in a specific way, and we pretty much know what that is. Instead of fighting against that view, he strategically 'agreed' with some parts of it, which is what a good negotiator does. You have to validate the position of your opponent, you have to demonstrate that you hear them, that you empathize with them.

While I do pretty much agree with you here, Ass, it can be seriously doubted "we" know "what it is, what others are invested in. Actually the problem is a lack of awareness of all the things "we" have invested ourselves in. This is a crucial element, even observed by here by Zionist Daniel Gordis in a rare spark of honesty: "we're a country that does not know how to be honest, even with itself". As usual with this camp the problems are well defined but the further analysis moves towards the wrong, opposite direction on a one-way train track.

I've marked it down: Anna believes the Bible is more or less filled with terrible stuff. I've noted it. I think I understand why you feel that way. Certainly from your perspective you are right. Now, let's nuke Australia!

Perhaps changing the tone and content of the discourse can have a few more consequences. The idea here being that the old situation with its rusty power dynamics is mostly fueled and maintained by constantly repeating the same old mantras. A world woven by stories and storyboards. What happens if we modify the script, the roles and characters a bit? Does the plot evolve? How real are these "power politics", aren't they just constantly adapting themselves to apparent changes of heart and tone?

While I still believe Obama and his advisers nurture some crucial deceptions in similar vein as Bush & Co, the power of changing tones, showing respect and demonstrating desire for truth and evenness cannot be underestimated. Likely it will give rise to opposing powers to reveal their ugly face while they're scrambling in panic, like lifting a heavy rock and looking at what crawls beneath. This is what I believe one of the main purposes of Obama's current tactics: smoking the bugs out into the open for all to see. Most dangerous tactic as history has shown.

[Leyla Shen]

Honest people love Cartman.

Be honest with a Jew today!