Al-Hayah Online "Obama Does Not Please Anyone" Jihad Al-Khazin

Al-Hayah Online
"Obama Does Not Please Anyone"
Jihad Al-Khazin
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 Text translated from Arabic

When Barack Obama put himself forward as a US presidential candidate, it seemed as if every US citizen knew everything about the Democrat Senator. The left considered him a left winger, the right claimed that he wanted to transform the country into a socialist one, the Likudists "accused" him of being a Muslim, and other extremist groups cast doubt on the fact that he was born in the United States, and still are trying to prove that he has been pretending incorrectly to be a US citizen. There were those who expected him to put an immediate end to George Bush's war, and those who insisted that he was no different from Bush in any aspect.

Obama was famous for delivering clever speeches, but he would not implement anything. Now he stands accused that his speeches do not have a soul, i.e. he lacks the sense of the street that he gathered around him when he was opposing the wars of Bush.

The man whom everybody knew two years ago has become an "unknown quantity." For two weeks I have been following up a debate triggered by Obama's address from the White House about the oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, and then the dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal from the command of the forces in Afghanistan. The right, the left, and those in-between accuse Obama of having no strategy for the war in Afghanistan or a timetable for ending it, and of not delivering a speech that responds to the feelings of the people about pollution, while he never did anything other than that until he ascended to power.

The charge is that he did not show anger or tears, but he spoke calmly as if he were detached from the case, which is the same as he did during the long battle to ratify the health care law, and the expansion of the rights of the homosexuals, i.e. those who practice sexual aberrations.

With regard to the oil pollution, Obama's political enemies have considered it from the first day to be an opportunity to accuse him of facing the "Katrina of Bush," in the sense that he would fail in the same way the former president failed in dealing with the effects of the hurricane that hit New Orleans. Until today, his political enemies accuse him of failing, despite the fact that he obtained from BP (British Petroleum) corporation - the explosion of whose oil well led to the pollution - 20 billion dollars, which the corporation allocated for compensations, compared to merely 383 million dollars, which Exxon paid in 1989 in compensation for the oil pollution in Alaska after the incident of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez.

Obama talked again about the need for the US people to abandon their "addiction to oil." However, I consider this as mere wishful thinking, because the entire US economy is based on oil energy, and it will not change in five, ten, or 20 years, and for the foreseeable future the United States will continue to pay some 300 billion dollars every year for imported oil.

I link the campaigns against Obama within his country to the traditional competition between the Democrats and the Republicans, and the escalation of this competition as the mid-term elections approach. I also link the campaigns specifically to the Israel lobby, or the well-known evil gang, which wants the president of the strongest country in the world to be a servant of Israel's interests at the expense of the US interests. Perhaps I might add that Obama has used up his good luck by ascending to the presidency, and today he pays the price of an oil explosion that he personally has not caused.

As an Arab citizen, I can say with as much objectivity as possible that President Obama has not implemented the promises he gave in his famous address from Cairo last year. If the president has let down the Arabs and Muslims, he must have benefited Israel. Perhaps this has occurred because Obama cannot do anything else as the two houses of the US Congress are in the pocket of the Israel lobby, and as the members of Congress support every crime committed by the Israeli Government more than the Knesset itself supports these crimes.

However, we read amazing things on the Likudist websites. There has been a major campaign against Obama because the US Administration agreed to the latest resolution by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference merely because it mentions Israel. The opinion of this campaign is that as Israel is not a member of the NPT, it should not have been mentioned, and the conference should have focused on North Korea, Iran, and Syria, i.e. the pretext is that the world should have focused on what does not exist, and disregarded the existing danger.

This campaign suddenly stopped with the international clamor that followed the crime against the peace campaigners on board the Freedom Flotilla. Again the Likudists criticized Obama's stance despite the fact that the Obama Administration prevented the explicit condemnation of Israel in the UN Security Council resolution; the reason of the criticism is that the US Administration did not settle the issue by preventing the establishment of an independent international investigation in the future.

Today, the supporters of Israel are waiting for two things that are due in September, namely the end of the period for the indirect negotiations, and the end of the "false" Israeli ban on construction work in the settlements. They want President Obama to exert pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to move to the direct negotiations, even with the resumption of the construction work (which I insist that it has not actually stopped). This is something that Abu-Mazin will never do, and let us wait and see.

Therefore, President Obama does not please anyone within his country, and does not please the Arabs, the Muslims, and Israel outside his country. However, Obama's popularity, which gradually declined after its perpendicular rise as a result of his Cairo address, still is high in Europe, Russia, and China. This cannot be explained except by the fact that any successor of George Bush is bound to be better than that disastrous president.

Barack Obama said at nearly the beginning of the year that he prefers to be a good president for one term rather than to be a bad president for two terms. However, today he stands accused of not supporting any person or cause, of resolving the problems in a mechanical way that is devoid of emotions, and of being the president who operates through committees of experts after Bush the "decision maker."