The Biggest Lie of them all
US President Barak Obama’s recent landmark speech in Cairo has been hailed by many as a turning point in the soured relationship between the West and Islamic world. But it has also been criticized by many as being fundamentally flawed and disingenuous.
Several egregious misrepresentations were brilliantly illuminated by David Frum’s article “The Wrong Speech” (National Post, 06.04.09) and by Charles Krauthammer’s “The Settlements Myth” (Washington Post 06.05.09). And yet, to this writer it seems that both of these outstanding commentators missed the biggest (and may I add most dangerous) fallacy of them all.
When the President spoke of the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland, he said: “… 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… Six million Jews were killed…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.”
In other words, according to this President the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in the Middle East derives from their European persecution in the form of sadistic inquisitions, crusades, blood libels and pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust.
This factual inaccuracy and gross misrepresentation wilfully ignores the Jewish people’s legal, historic and moral rights that stretch back some 3,300 years. Something the international community formally endorsed in 1922 when the League of Nations voted unanimously to reconstitute the Jewish commonwealth in the ancient Land of Israel.
Great Britain resigned its responsibility for the Palestinian Mandate in 1947 and returned legal purview to the UN, the successor of the League of Nations. The 1947 partition of the Mandate into Arab and Jewish states was accepted by the Palestinian Jews but totally rejected by the Arabs. Thus the lands of the Mandate between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea were, in accordance with International Law open to Jewish settlements.
To be sure, the real truth is that the Jewish People’s right to live in Israel in not rooted in the tragedies they endured during their 2000 years of exile, but by the fact that they had always been in exile from their historic Jewish homeland. It is the only homeland Jews have ever known as a sovereign nation, the only land Jews never left willingly, and the only land Jews have never forgotten and to which they always prayed for a return.
If President Obama would be the paragon of integrity and honesty to which he aspires, he could have eloquently described the essence and true legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state to a Muslim world that overwhelmingly refuses to acknowledge it.
Instead he chose to adopt the pan-Arab world’s revision of history that casts Israel as a colonial and illegal occupier of other people’s lands. And by doing so, not only did he not address their refusal to accept Israel; he legitimised it.
Frankly, it is difficult to understand how a so carefully crafted address, delivered in a so carefully selected setting mistakenly omitted such vital and meaningful details. Interestingly the President, who claims to be more committed to hard truths than any of his predecessors, ironically contributed to the propagation of the biggest fallacy of them all. A fallacy that none before him ever endorsed.
Compare his pre-meditated blindness to the true justification of Israel’s rebirth to words spoken by Prime Minister Stephen Harper (05.29.08) “… From shattered Europe and other countries near and far, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob made their way home. Their pilgrimage was the culmination of a two-thousand-year-old dream; it is a tribute to the unquenchable human aspiration for freedom, and a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people.”
And that is why I am prouder than ever to be Canadian and why I believe that it is our Prime Minister, rather than the American President, who speaks the truth and has the moral capital to lead the world in a peaceful direction.