Obama's hearts and minds trifecta

By Donald K Emmerson

Asia Times Online

United States President Barack Hussein Obama's speech last week in Cairo, the second stop on a three-destination diplomatic tour to win Muslim hearts and minds, was outstanding.

First, it opened daylight between the US and Israel. Israeli settlements on the West Bank are impediments to a two-state solution and a stable peace with Palestine, and Obama did not split hairs. He did not distinguish between increments to existing settler populations by birth versus immigration with or without adding a room to an existing house. "The United States," he said, "does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

The American Israel Political Affairs Committee, which advertises itself as "America's pro-Israel lobby", cannot have been pleased to hear that sentence. But without some semblance of independence from Israel, the US cannot be a credible broker between the two sides. It is not necessary to treat Israeli and Palestinian actions as morally equivalent in order to understand that both sides bear responsibility for decades of deadlock.

New settlements and the expansion of existing ones merely feed Palestinian suspicions that Israel intends permanently to occupy the West Bank.

But Obama's criticism of Israeli settlements did not prevent him from also stating flatly that "Palestinians must abandon violence" and he did not pander to his audience. The most effective discourse on controversial topics involving Islam and Muslims is both sensitive to feelings and frank about facts, as I argue in a forthcoming book. [1]

Inter-faith dialogues that rely on mutual self censorship - an agreed refusal to raise divisive topics or speak hard truths - resemble sand castles. Empathy based on denial is unlikely to survive the next incoming tide of reality. Respect without candor, in my view, is closer to fawning than to friendship.

As Obama put it in Cairo, "In order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors ... As the Holy Koran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth'." His listeners applauded - most of them, perhaps, because he had cited their preferred book, but some at least because he had defended accuracy regardless of what this or that book might avow.

In the "partnership" that Obama offered his audience, "sources of tensions" were not to be ignored. On the contrary, he said, "we must face these tensions squarely". He then followed his own advice by noting that extremists acting in the name of Islam had killed more adherents of their own religion than they had Christians, Jews or the followers of any other faith. In the same candid vein, he noted with disapproval the propensity of some Muslims to repeat "vile stereotypes about Jews", the opposition of Muslim extremists to educating women, and the fact of discrimination against Christian Copts in Egypt, the very country in which he spoke.

Third, his speech was notable for what it did not contain. The word "terrorism", often used in the Manichean rhetoric of former president George W Bush, did not appear once. In Washington, in his January 26, 2009, televised interview with al-Arabiya, Obama had used the phrase "Muslim world" 11 times in 44 minutes - an average of once every four minutes. In the run-up to his Cairo speech, the White House had repeatedly hyped it as an address to the "Muslim world". Yet in the 55 minutes it took him to deliver the oration, the words "Muslim world" did not occur, not even once. He must have been advised to delete the reference from his text, and the excision strengthened the result.

Some say that 1.4 billion Muslims have too little in common to justify speaking of a "Muslim world" at all. But the already vast and implicitly varied compass of any "world" diminishes the risk of homogenization. One can easily refer to "the Muslim world" while stressing its diversity. Many Muslims and non-Muslims already use the phrase without stereotyping its members. No, the reasons why Obama avoided the phrase were less definitional than they were political in nature.

Had Obama explicitly addressed "the Muslim world" in Cairo, he would have risked implying that his host represented that world, as if Egypt were somehow supremely or quintessentially Muslim. That would have been poorly received in the many other Muslim-majority societies that diversely span the planet from Morocco to Mindanao in the southern Philippines.

Worlds apart

Several years ago a professor from Cairo's al-Azhar University, which co-sponsored Obama's appearance, told me in all seriousness that Indonesian Muslims, because they did not speak Arabic, were not Muslims at all. Obama did not wish to be read by the followers of an ostensibly universalist Islam as endorsing such a parochially Arabo-centric conceit.

The US president could, of course, have mentioned "the Muslim world" and in the next breath denied that it was represented by Egypt, a country under an authoritarian regime with a reputation for corruption. But it was far smarter and more effective for Obama to shun the phrase altogether, thereby avoiding the need to clarify it by insulting his hosts. That candid but insensitive move would have potentially triggered nationalist and Islamist anger not only in his Egyptian audience, but in other Muslim-majority countries as well.

Indonesian Muslims, for example, would have wondered with some apprehension whether to expect comparable behavior were Obama to visit their country later this year. Obama's audience at Cairo University was, instead, subjected to twin eloquences of absence and silence - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's not being present and Obama's not mentioning him at all.

Eloquent, too, was the absence of Israel from his itinerary. This was not a sign of hostility toward Tel Aviv, a bilateral bond he referred to as "unbreakable" - but an avowal that Washington on his watch would not limit its foreign policy horizon to what any one country would allow.

Obama mispronounced the Arabic term for the head covering worn by some Muslim women. The word is hijab, not hajib. But that small slip of the tongue was trivial compared with the brilliance and timeliness of his speech. Rhetoric is one thing, of course; realities are quite another. The tasks of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum and improving relations with the heterogeneous Muslim world are more easily discussed than done.

Illustrating the Muslim world's extraordinary diversity is the many and marked differences between Turkey, where Obama spoke on April 6 on his first overseas trip, his Egyptian venue two months later, and Indonesia, where he is likely to visit in the months ahead. Before his choice of Cairo was announced, several commentators advised him instead to give his "Muslim world" speech in June in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Rather than risk legitimating Mubarak's autocracy, they argued, he should celebrate Indonesia's success in combining moderate Islam with liberal democracy.

Following their advice, however, would have been a diplomatic mistake. Not only did speaking in Cairo enable Obama boldly to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a podium close to its Middle Eastern epicenter. Had Obama instead spoken from Indonesia, his visit would have been tainted by an appearance of American intervention in the domestic politics of that country, where President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is up for re-election on July 8.

Earlier in his career, Yudhoyono completed military training programs at the US's Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, and earned a master's degree in management from Webster University in St Louis. No previous Indonesian head of state has had a closer prior association with the US, and Yudhoyono's rivals for the presidency are already berating him and his running mate as "neo-liberals" who have pawned Indonesia's economy to the capitalist West.

Yudhoyono's popularity ratings among Indonesians are even better than Obama's are among Americans. Obama was wise to postpone visiting Indonesia until after its electoral dust has cleared and the next administration is democratically in place in October. A gathering of leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which Obama is expected to attend, is conveniently scheduled for mid-November in Singapore. He could easily visit Indonesia en route to or from the event.

An Indonesian journalist interviewed Obama shortly after his historic speech in Cairo. The president virtually confirmed this itinerary by saying that his next trip to Asia would include Indonesia. He said he looked forward to revisiting the neighborhood in Jakarta where he had lived as a child, and to eating again his favorite Indonesian foods - fried rice, bakso (meatball) soup, and rambutan fruit among them.

A trifecta occurs when a gambler correctly predicts the first three finishers of a race in the correct order. Obama has apparently placed his diplomatic bet on the sequence: Ankara - Cairo - Jakarta. There are still questions about whether Obama's actions will match his words, and whether the US Congress will go along with his policy prescriptions. But with two destinations down and one to go, he is well on his way to completing a trifecta in the race for hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

Note
1. Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam

Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University. He is the editor of Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (Stanford/ISEAS, 2008).

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