Eshu's blues: Obama scabs on the autonomy of Palestine-and the rest of us
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
"If I lived in Iran or Afghanistan right now, I'd be preparing to defend myself from the new age imperialists who are now running the United States."
The "suspense" is over. President Barack Obama is scabbing on the victims of Gaza, as was made plain in a press conference conducted alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joseph Biden and the president's emissary to Palestine, George Mitchell (1/22/09, "President Obama Delivers Remarks to State Department Employees").
If anyone needed further proof that Obama's perspective is something other than the usual contempt for the independence of the so-called developing world that guides the Imperium of Washington D.C., the evidence to the contrary is right before your eyes right now. Obama continues to praise the efforts of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and former Palestinian Authority and Fateh leader Mahmoud Abbas, which is a little like the rest of the world insisting that it be allowed to conduct diplomatic relations with George W. Bush. The Palestinian people know that, for better or worse, Hamas is their chosen leadership. Not Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Not the State of Israel. Not Hosni Mubarak. And not U.S. President Barack Obama, whose dignity is accorded more respect from the people of Palestine than is allotted their own by Barack Obama.
The elected leadership of Palestine is Hamas; Hamas, with its motley history, its profoundly anti-Israel perspective, and its elements of anti-Semitism. Hamas is Islamic fundamentalist to the core - for that is the only sort of leadership the working poor of Palestine have been allowed, every other secular sort has been smashed to pieces by western influence through cat's paws like Israel and the Arab Emirates over and over again. Hamas, with all its terrible and deadly contradictions, is the leader of Palestine. Israel may hate and distrust Hamas, but Hamas became as tangible as it became because Israel gave financial and military support to Hamas in order to create problems for Fateh back in the days of Yasser Arafat. This was hardly an unprecedented tactic for reactionary Zionism, the historic record shows that there were Zionist factions that aided, abetted, and actually marched with the Nazi Party of Germany during the 1930s. The "reservation cops" are an ongoing feature of how persecuted nationalities are kept in place, and this is no less true of Zionism in its history then it is of groups like the Guardians Of the Oglala Nation (today still remembered by their acronym GOON) who played an active role in the FBI's brutal suppression of the American Indian Movement in the U.S. in the early 1970s. Just as the United States created its own nemesis in the person of Osama binh Laden, reactionary Zionism has created its own nemesis in Hamas.
"Hamas, with all its terrible and deadly contradictions, is the leader of Palestine."
We are supposed to recognize the magnanimity in President Obama's call for the State of Israel to allow basic supplies into Gaza to address human needs. You'll please forgive those of us who are unimpressed, given that the actual levels of damage on the Gaza strip amount to the following:
40% of the Gaza Strip is without power;
50,000 men, women and children are homeless;
400,000 are without running water;
84% of the population have no secure source of food, and what limited agricultural resource that was available to the population has been routinely destroyed by the Israeli military;
26 medical clinics have been destroyed;
And even by conservative estimates, 900 to 1200 people are dead. War induced injuries and bodily maiming extend into the thousands.
President Obama may tune his dulcet tones all he wants. If he were the humanitarian he pretends to be, he would be upholding the Geneva Convention, and condemning the State of Israel before the world. He is not doing so, and his hypocrisy is shameful. If Venezuela, for example, had committed such a crime, our new president would be holding forth with many a ringing phrase, count on it. The fact is that he endorses the recent Israeli military atrocities in Gaza, and he reiterated as much in his statement of January 22nd. And if I lived in Iran or Afghanistan right now, I'd be preparing to defend myself from the new age imperialists who are now running the United States, despite all the promises of President Obama and the U.S. based political cult which follows this charismatic champion with faked muscles.
"If Obama were the humanitarian he pretends to be, he would be upholding the Geneva Convention, and condemning the State of Israel before the world."
There are many "progressive" bloggers out there who maintain that, in choosing a Hamas government, Gaza was asking for the hammering it has received from Israel. It matters not that in choosing Islamic fundamentalism, the Palestinian supporters of Hamas are only mirroring the Zionist fundamentalism that seeks to identify its reactionary politics as the whole of Judaism. It matters not that both peoples are the targets of a destruction that stem from two of the most insidious ruling class sponsored ideologies functioning in the world today; Zionism and fundamentalist Islam. And it doesn't matter to many a "progressive," because we're only talking about the non-white poor and a city of the Arab poor unable to defend themselves from fighter jets and white phosphorous weapons. The destruction of infrastructure and life on the Gaza for the sake of the nightmare utopia that is Zionism is acceptable. But the Islamic fundamentalism of Palestine is to be held accountable for embracing the same sort of race myth, even as the state of Israel continues to be lauded for embracing reactionary Zionism. The actions of Israel are seen as a suitable response to the electoral choice exercised by the people of the Gaza Strip. But it's a peculiar sense of justice we're talking here.
I mean, suppose we apply this same standard to an attack that was made on the United States. Look at what happened when the shoe was on the other foot in New York City on September 11, 2001. Recall the charges of "callousness" and "insensitivity" to the plight of U.S. victims of terror when it was suggested by Ward Churchill and many others that perhaps the terror strike that took out the World Trade Center was in fact the result of the mayhem that the United States has been helping to sow in the Near East for several decades now. Such people are made public targets for national hate week led by right-wing bloggers, state governments and corporate media whores like Bill O'Reilly - as Ward Churchill was - where they are informed that no history before September 11th is even relevant. So as usual, the powerful nations of the world expect to stand outside of the consequence of their history, the weaker countries are to be held accountable for contradictions that were bred within them by the imperial powers. Gaza is only the latest chapter of this display of selective memory and imperial arrogance. The so-called "war on terror," which President Obama embraced in the opening lines of his inaugural speech, knows neither humility or shame, even as the essential fraudulence of its premise continues to be made manifest.
The late Pan-African scholar Aime Cesaire addressed this ideological barbarity and practice many years ago in his exchanges on colonialism with the Haitian poet Renee Depestre. At the root of Hitlerism, said Cesaire, we find the inability of the western "progressive" to recognize himself in the actions of the classic imperial world, which was the actual progenitor of the policies which led the Third Reich:
"The powerful nations of the world expect to stand outside of the consequence of their history, the weaker countries are to be held accountable for contradictions."
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent, and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.
And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been - and still is - narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.
I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.
The United States continues to support the most reactionary claims of Zionism, and in doing so, makes more and more remote the possibility that there will ever be an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict in our lifetimes, in spite of what the new U.S envoy George Mitchell says. There is a world of difference between defending the rights of Israel/Hebrew/Judaic people to a homeland on the one hand, and insisting that the justice for 900 years of European anti-Semitism be taken out of the flesh of the Palestinian nation on the other. But the refusal to recognize this criminal theory is what places the element of race at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and despite everything we're hearing about the end of racist dogma in the United States, despite the election of a black man to the presidency, the dictatorship of race and class remains at the core of both U.S. and western ideology and practice. The empire continues. The war on the people of the Gaza Strip is only the most recent evidence.
"Capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men."
In attempting to raise this point this glorious inaugural week, I have encountered those who tell me I live with the "stale ideas of another time," and that "the ground has moved from beneath my feet," as the new president says. Methinks I smell the old warped mambo of postmodern dogma, which has a bad habit of declaring ideas its lazy- minded adherents aren't remotely familiar with to be defunct.
No one begrudges anyone their dismissal of Marxist analysis or Franz Fanon when people are somewhat savvy about what it is they're dismissing. But it is the Obamian wholesale repudiation of a century of living anti-imperial and human rights struggle I have problems with, and that's been going on since before the Pastor Wright fiasco made more of us aware of it. That's what Obama and his corporate followers mean when they accuse the weaker nations of the world of "blaming their problems on the west," as was stated in his inaugural speech.
Oh, but it got better when he got to talking about life here at home, didn't it? Check his barefaced lie that there was, among our general population, some "collective refusal to make the hard decisions" about how our U.S. economy has been directed. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't recall there ever having been a "collective" vote as to whether we should have created the pattern of mass indebtedness that has driven the economy of this country for decades, and which, by the way, until last fall was actually referred to by leaders of Mr. Obama's party and the junk capitalist shills on the other side of the aisle as an economic recovery. Someone somewhere made those decisions and sold the public this bag of medicine show shit, but I know it wasn't me, and I'm sure it wasn't any of you.
Nope, near as I can tell, most of the people I know were organizing and fighting to keep our pensions, what limited health care we were able to get out of many a stingy employer, stay on top of our mortgages, strengthen our schools, and make sure we got paid enough to raise our children on so that we didn't have to fall back on the credit hustlers Mr. Obama and his friends have chosen to bail out. And Mr. Obama's party, the "democrats," were busy alongside the "republicans," shutting down and co-opting our efforts when they weren't telling us that the days of organized labor and what they like to call "the excesses of the Sixties" were a thing of the past. Oh yes, a refusal to engage with reality was going on somewhere, but it wasn't collective, and it wasn't a fantasy engaged in by people like you or me, and Barack Obama knows it.
"I don't recall there ever having been a ‘collective' vote as to whether we should have created the pattern of mass indebtedness that has driven the economy of this country for decades."
There is the reality of the working class world, which is the reality of the Gaza Strip, and the urban black working class reality of Sean Bell, murdered on his wedding day by New York City cops, and Oscar Grant, who was murdered by the Oakland Transit cops on New Year's Day. The Gaza Strip is the reality of the inner city in the United States, writ large.
Then there is the pseudo-reality of race and class justice that the corporate sponsors of Barack Obama - and his programmatic petty boojwah supporters of whatever racial and class background - want us all to absorb. Well, I been there, and I done that. Only back in my starry-eyed youth, Barack Obama was named David Dinkins, or Norm Rice, or Coleman Young (reservation cops all), or some other sad clown who was arrogant enough to run interference for a ruling class so venal and crazy it doesn't even care that its ass is on fire. And it doesn't take a stellar political economist to realize that if the problems of race and class or workplace and cultural empowerment can't get solved at the regional level using the political schematics of the capitalist system, those problems sure as hell aren't going to get solved at the national level by a charming rogue who uses the same schematic. Trust me on this, even as the trumpet and rose petal spectacle of the inaugural continues to ring in our ears: Obama's United States is still the Western Imperium, which means it's the tyranny of race, class and commodity, but now it's parading at the national level in blackface. (Talk about stale ideas!)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the future of Black America and everywhere else is in the future of the politically independent workplace and community mobilization of the working class majority, or there is no future. There was a time in this country when more of us understood this, and were willing to engage with the hellishly difficult task of putting the point across, firm in content as well as mild in tone. We need to become a black working class movement for ourselves, rather than in ourselves, as the Old Moor said. Cults of personality may feel good, but at the end of the day, they are only spectaclist fast food to be ingested at a moment when we need to be creating democratic sustenance in our own cook-shops.
BAR columnist michael hureaux is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: [email protected]