Hearts, minds… but no political will?

Contributed by Nadia

The honeymoon will end soon

By Yaman

As much as President Obama’s speech in Cairo has been branded as one “to the Muslim world”–whatever that might mean–it is certainly a speech whose audience spanned across a much larger swath of the world. In terms of signaling substantive policy changes for the peoples of that world, there is not much to count on. Much of the lip service is the same as that of the Bush era. We are not fighting Islam, but rather extremists–yes, Bush said that. We want the Muslim world to prosper–yes, Bush said that. We care about the oppressed sectors of your society–women, religious minorities, etc. Yes, Bush said that too. The main difference thus far is that not enough time has yet passed for the disparity between words and action to become irreconcilable (the disparity between words and words, though, is another story, as Obama dubbed the misogynist and racist monarch of Saudi Arabia to be full of wisdom just a single day before he went to Cairo).

I suppose it is a trapping of American public discourse, though, to look only at what Obama’s speech does to “them,” the mass that used to be the Arab street but is now the Muslim world, a behemoth even more difficult to manage. Newspapers and television pundits have been abuzz for weeks as to what will be required to “win their hearts and minds,” to “turn the page,” or as David Axelrod is branding it, to initiate “a new beginning.” There’s an elusive formula, it seems, for concocting that love potion of words that will win over the Arab mind. We’ve given up long ago, apparently, on developing reasonable policies for engaging both the governments and peoples of the Middle East, so now all we can resort to is casting spell after spell until one works. A little Qur’an here, a little civilizational worth there, and abracadabra, the Muslims are happy again!

The honeymoon will end soon, though, when Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran don’t throw down their arms to hug the nearest American president. Then perhaps we will have the same old question thrown in our faces: why are they so obstinate? Why do they hate us?

The great risk of relying only on emotional entreaties is that we will never legitimize their political aspirations as we do our own. We want them to work in concert with us and our agendas (it’s easier than killing them), but God forbid we consider doing the same to them. That is probably the most identifiably corrupt part of Obama’s speech, that he is trying to sell a means of engagement that he would never think to adopt himself as President of the United States. Telling the Palestinians to adopt non-violence takes quite a bit of chutzpah when you arrived on a plane called Air Force One, your presence in Cairo relies on the violence of Egyptian security forces, and you are Commander-in-Chief of one of the most powerful militaries in the world. Why can’t non-violence work against al-Qaeda, President Obama? QED.

Too many Muslims will fawn over Obama’s words as the praise and legitimation they’ve always been waiting for, but, ironically, Obama’s speech is probably more important for non-Muslims in the West to hear than for Muslims either in the West or elsewhere. With many of his comments, Obama normalized the Muslim presence in American discourse. I think this is significant, symbolically, at a time when it is certainly not infrequent to be kicked off an airplane for wearing Arabic text on your clothing or detained and interrogated at a football game for praying behind the bleachers. Even the Arabic word for school (madrasa) has been criminalized in this country. That we need this kind of intervention in the first place reflects more poorly on American society that it does positively on Obama, but his words may have these effects nevertheless.

Those words will not be significant or satisfactory, though, unless a rejection of Muslim-bashing is accompanied by an actual change in policies that unjustly target Muslims and Arabs in America. That includes government infiltration of mosques, community organizations, political groups and other spaces identified with Arabs and Muslims. American laws that disproportionately target Arabs and Muslims for giving money to humanitarian charities must be reformed. Arabs and Muslims must be allowed to participate fully in the political system and in political discourse without being required to take extra steps to prove their loyalty or belonging to this country. Humanizing Muslims (giving them “hearts and minds”) is one thing, but treating them like free and independent political actors is entirely another.

Obama’s speech did little more than tell us that other people in the world are… people. Politically it offered us, as civilians, no new means of engagement. It left us as passive observers there to witness the spectacle of Obama’s exotified trip to Egypt, accompanied by the media’s intriguing punditry of whether or not “they” will accept our man. Though it addressed Muslims in a way that differed in tone from Bush, Obama’s speech continued to acknowledge foreign policy as a thing that only Presidents and Kings can participate in.

For American citizens, this consolidation of power in the hands of the President will never lead to the changes or reforms necessary to see a world with less oppression and more justice. To achieve those ends we must altogether reject the paradigm that relegates international issues to the hands of the leaders of countries. Instead, we must work to build ties on the ground between unions, activists, and human rights orgs in various countries that can work in tandem to achieve the reforms needed in multiple governments at the same time, as in boycott and divestment movements. As Hossam noted in his op-ed, Egypt’s activists, unions, and civil rights organizations are all “seeking allies in the West. Allies that could not be found in the White House.”

A speech in Cairo won’t accomplish that sort of democratization of international politics. It’s up to ordinary people like us to step up to the task.