Obama: Don't Surrender to the Jewish Lobby

By Khalid Amayreh

Occupied Jerusalem

xpis, November 7, 2008

Barack Obama’s landslide  victory against the republican candidate John McCain  is undoubtedly a landmark event in American history. A Blackman, after all,  has for the first  time been elected President of the very country that  only a few decades ago murdered  Rev. Martin Luther King for daring to dream of racial  equality in America.

Obama’s spectacular victory is already fostering a certain  atmosphere of optimism in many quarters, mainly because America and the world won’t be affronted by  another four years of  George Bush’s lies, wars and mindless bellicosity. 

Non the less, lest Obama repeat Bush’s criminal sins, he will have to adopt a truly moral approach to domestic and foreign policies,   especially with regard to the Middle East, the most unstable and destabilizing spot on earth.

In fact, I dare say that with a combination of honesty, good-will, wisdom, and fair-play, Obama could neutralize  or eliminate all hostility to the United States all over the globe.

Yes, Obama could accomplish  such a monumental task without shedding a single drop of blood, American or otherwise, provided he walks in the right path and does what is morally correct, even if it is proven to be politically incorrect.

First and foremost, Obama would have to disobey and disregard the monstrous  power now holding America by the throat. It is the insolent Jewish lobby, or AIPAC, which is brazenly bragging about its “tight control” of American politics and policies, especially foreign policy.  Defying and ignoring AIPAC will eventually make the difference between a successful Obama administration, or another four years of fiasco and failure. AIPAC would try to mobilize the American media and Congress against the new President. However, with the right combination of wisdom and determination,  Obama can defeat them.

So don’t let them bully you or scare you. Ignore their threats.

It was this evil  monster that  effectively coerced America, by way of deception and mendacity,  to invade, occupy and destroy two sovereign countries and cause the death and maiming of millions of people, including thousands of Americans. It is the same monster that is now pressing, even pressuring, America to attack another sovereign Muslim country to ensure Israel’s regional supremacy. 

So, Mr. Obama, don’t surrender to them, you are not indebted to them, you owe them nothing. You are only accountable to the American people who elected you to lead, and the American people don’t want more wars, neither  for Israel nor for oil.

Second,  you should understand that hostility toward the US  in some parts of the Muslim world is not an intrinsic phenomenon having to do with built-in elements in  the Islamic faith as we are told by the likes of   Daniel Pipes and Steve Emersons and other Islamophobes, who have made their hatred of Islam and  Muslims a career and a way of life.

This is  simply a canard, a monumental lie, a kind of modern  blood libel  meant to create a false and unnecessary clash between America and the Muslim world for the sake of Israel and its territorial aggrandizement. 

Certainly Muslims  don’t hate America for its freedoms and civil liberties, and especially its democracy, the very democracy that enabled you to become  President of the most powerful nation on earth.

Indeed, the opposite is truth.

If anything,  Muslims hate those American policies that enforce oppression, injustice, authoritarianism, and dictatorship;  policies  that enable criminal regimes, like Israel, to torment, dispossess and persecute innocent people whose only “crime” is their enduring determination to be free;  policies that allow Arab dictators to savage their own people for desiring  freedom and democracy.

It is these policies that allowed  Nazi-like Israel  to perpetrate the worst conceivable  crimes under the sun and get away with impunity, thanks to unlimited and unconditional American support. Is this “the shining city upon a  hill” that John  Winthrop dreamed of 378 years ago?

Mr. President,  Israel, which many intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, have described as a  crime against humanity, had arrogated an entire country from its  rightful native inhabitants and is now trying to finish the job by stealing more Arab land, carrying out more ethnic cleansing  and building more Jewish-only settlements for fanatical settlers who want to commit a Biblical-style  genocide in the name of God. This is not far-fetched, ask a trusted academic or scholar, or even an honest observer, and he would tell you the truth.

Mr. President, do you think that  a country that builds on occupied territories   hundreds of  for- Jew-only-settlements, inhabited by racist religious fanatics who claim that non-Jews are animals in a human shape, really desire peace with its neighbors? Come to the West Bank, Mr. President, and you will see what defies linguistic description. The comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are not made out of nothing.

This is the very country that murders babies and school children “in self defense?!! A country that demolishes innocent people’s homes “in self defense”!! A country whose Gestapo-like soldiers raid orphanages in the dead of night and throw orphan children onto the street. It is a country that is based on murder, theft and lie while claiming to be a light upon the nations.

A true democracy, Mr. President, doesn’t bar millions of men, women and children from accessing food and work for years simply because they elected a political party that Israel didn’t like.

A true democracy doesn’t force starving people to smuggle cattle for food via underground tunnel. I needn’t remind you Mr. President that the  last time this happened was at Ghetto Warsaw. We know the rest of the story.

A true democracy doesn’t discriminate against a segment of its citizens  because they follow the “wrong” religion.

Israel, Mr. President, is not a true democracy, Israel is a true terrorocracy.

So, don’t be deceived by the nice-sounding words of Israeli leaders. Don’t pay attention to what Israeli leaders say, pay attention to what they do. And what they do is more ethnic cleansing and more settlement expansion in order to make true peace unachievable and impossible, which I believe they have already done, taking advantage of American collusion, acquiescence and flaccidity.

As to the Palestinians,  I would like to appeal to you Mr. President to put an end to the policy of deception adopted by successive American administrations.

A few  years ago, we were promised a state where people can travel,  access their schools, colleges and hospitals freely. However, thanks to the American government’s subservience to the Jewish lobby, we ended up having  a police state without a state where our basic  human rights and civil liberties are  constantly violated jointly by Israel and the so-called Palestinian Authority.

Mr. President don’t help the PA torment its own citizens and violate their human and civil rights under the rubric of fighting terror. I am saying this because the Bush administration has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars  to train PA security forces to repress our people on Israel’s behalf.

I am neither suggesting nor recommending that the US stop supporting our people. We do need your support and goodwill.

However, it is  morally imperative that you tell the PA in  unmistakable language to stop violating our human rights and civil liberties.

Mr. President, don’t surrender to the tendentious and utterly unethical classification  of  other nations into rouge states  and civilized states. This is a racist classification, to say the very least, because all  human beings, irrespective of their religion and race deserve to be treated with respect. All men are created equal by God.

Hence, I suggest you  try to sit down with all these “pariah groups and regimes,” talk to them, listen to their perspectives, maybe, just maybe,  they have a legitimate view  point.

Don’t surrender to the ready-made stereotypes about Hamas and Iran, to mention a few examples. Try to initiate contacts with them. This wouldn’t harm anyone.

Let it be known that your upcoming administration will be willing and ready to sit down with whoever is willing to talk. 

In fact, if America sits down with her real or  imagined enemies, you probably will discover, even though  belatedly, that these people have no real hatred for America and that they do have legitimate grievances. Don’t let Israel and American Zionism shape your perception of other nations and other people.

As to Islam, you should try to seek authentic information about this great religion which once was the leading force of enlightenment in this world.

Islam is not Osama bin Laden and Abu Musaab al Zarkawi. Islam is the religion of 1.5 billion human beings the vast majority of whom are honest people who lead an honest and moral life, very much like other people in the rest of the world.

And don’t you pay attention to those who would tell you that Muslims don’t like freedom and democracy or that they are anti-American. There are no people on the face of earth who hate freedom.

Muslims, especially Arabs, are thirsty for the type of democracy that has just brought you to power. Muslims, especially Arabs, want to be able to exercise their God-given rights and freedoms, the very rights and  freedoms they are denied thanks to evil and corrupt  dictators who are supported and backed  and sustained in power by your country.

And don’t you believe those who would tell you that democracy in the Arab world would  breed rulers who are anti-American. This might happen at the beginning, but eventually mutual interests and good-will  would prevail.

The important thing is that under your administration, America should stop supporting and backing dictatorial  regimes that savage, mistreat and humiliate their own masses. These regimes are hated by the masses, which eventually generates hatred and hostility toward the United States, the real or perceived guarantor of these  dictatorships.

So, please, don’t  side with  these dictators and despots against the will of  their own people. Let America adopt a moral stance in this regard, a stance that we would make America proud and make hundreds of millions of Arabs realize that America is more than just rapacious multi-national companies and greedy arms manufacturers.

Yes, we don’t expect America to be the moralist policeman of the world. But America can and should tell these tyrants to stop oppressing their people. After all, many of these dynastic dictatorships are answerable to you, to the US, not to their own people.

Mr. President, if you address these very real grievances honestly and seriously, and if you force Israel to give up the spoils of war and end its decades-old Nazi-like occupation of our ancestral homeland and oppression of our people,  you will succeed in neutralizing most or  all  of America’s  perceived or imagined enemies.

And I assure you, Mr. President,  that all Muslims and Arabs and humans on this earth   would then stand alongside America for the common good of humanity.

Mr. President, God willed that America be the richest and most powerful nation of our time. So don’t abuse or misuse this status.

If you do, you will only be charting your way toward self-destruction and ultimate demise.

God doesn’t wrong people, people wrong themselves.