[lbo-talk] Joseph Massad: Emperor Obama Vs the Arab people

[Joseph Catron]

"In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered an
important speech titled Wind of Change, first in Accra and later in
Cape Town, signaling British decolonisation of its African territories
and warning the South African regime to move away from its apartheid
policies. In 2011, US President Barack Obama begged to differ. While
dubbing his speech Winds of Change, in reference to the uprisings
ongoing across the Arab World, his speech made it clear that the same
winds were not yet blowing in Washington DC, and perhaps never will.
President Obama's second speech on the Arab world, delivered on 19
May, showed such constancy and lack of change in US policy as his
first speech, delivered in Cairo on 4 June 2009. This is not to say
that the two speeches lacked flair and imperial hubris in the
delivery, but rather that their characteristic lack of substance or
novelty, let alone their decorative and gratuitous verbosity,
demonstrate that imperial climate control in Washington can never be
'changed', not even by the wind of the Arab uprisings.

"The problem with US policy in the Arab world is not only its
insistence on broadcasting credulous US propaganda - easily fed to
Americans, yet with few takers elsewhere in the world - but also that
it continues to show a complete lack of familiarity with Arab
political culture and insists on insulting the intelligence of most
Arabs, whom it claims to address directly with speeches such as Mr
Obama's ..."

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/2011521115956696675.html

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
mægen lytlað."