The New York Times‘ September 26 coverage of Barack Obama’s UN address on Arab democracy, free speech and violence included a good sampling of the distortions, double standards and bigotry often present in U.S. corporate reporting on these issues.
Obama at the UN (Africa Renewal)
Helene Cooper‘s news report (9/26/12) explained that Obama’s speech was a “strong defense of America’s belief in freedom of speech,” challenging “fledgling Arab and North African democracies to ensure that right even in the face of violence.”
According to Cooper, Obama also “asserted that the flare-up of violence over a video that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad would not set off a retreat from his support of the Arab democracy movement,” adding that Americans “have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their view.”
A Times editorial the same day applauded Obama, explaining that “anti-American violence in the Muslim world demanded a firm pushback from President Obama, who finally delivered it on Tuesday in the last United Nations General Assembly speech of his term.” The editors were also pleased that Obama “gave a full-throated defense of the First Amendment right that, in this country, protects even hateful writings, films and speech.” The editors quoted Obama: “We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.”
And they lauded the president again, this time with a bigoted putdown of Muslims: “Mr. Obama was right to deliver that message, however foreign it is in much of the Muslim world.” (According to Gallup Center for Muslim Studies director Dalia Mogahed– NPR, 9/21/12–Middle Easterners support constitutional free speech rights “in percentages above 90 percent.”)
Let’s begin with “anti-American violence in the Muslim world.” Does it even approach the level of violence visited on Muslim countries by the U.S.? No. Not even close. It would have been good for the Times to mention this.
It would also have been helpful if Cooper and the editors had explained that the U.S. actually has a horrendous record when it comes to supporting free-speech and democracy in the Muslim world.
The U.S. currently supports and arms autocratic and free-speech averse regimes in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Until recently, Tunisia and Egypt were U.S.-backed dictatorships. One might argue that the U.S. no longer overtly thwarts free speech and democracy in Tunisia, but that’s a harder case to make for Egypt, whose military the U.S. has continued to fund through decades of torture, detention and disappearances.
Not even military crackdowns after the 2011 Tahrir Square uprisings or the dissolving of Egypt’s democratically elected parliament by its military allied supreme court in June interrupted of the flow of money from Washington to the Egyptian generals. Indeed, following the Egyptian spring uprisings, Washington pushed Egypt’s former “vice president” Omar Suleiman, otherwise known as “the CIA’s man in Cairo” and Egypt’s “torturer-in-chief,” to head the Egypt’s supposed transition to democracy (Guardian, 2/5/11).
The Times might also have mentioned that the administration doesn’t have a pristine record on free speech at home either, where it has conducted a record number of prosecutions against government whistleblowers.
Our forty-fourth president is a foursquare defender of free speech.
As such, his speeches are unfettered flights of fancy, free from any fealty to factuality.
Of course, he is far from a lone figure in that fetid forum.
And a feckless corpress facilitates the farce.
Feh.
I’m always amazed at how a person who holds so many deeply contradictory positions, such as does Obama, can appear so relaxed in public.
The rigidity in speech and body motions were always so easily seen and so frequently remarked upon when Al Gore and John Kerry spoke in public.
Can it be that this deeply divided man can be totally unaware, from moment to moment, of his own vulnerabilities to public examination? But then no one has been so rude as to call him out on his inconsistencies in a meaningful way in a public forum, except the other corporate party, who would suffer the same vulnerabilities, and to their own disadvantage.
Much of the US president’s 30-minute speech was dedicated to the recent upheavals that swept the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries in South Asia and Africa, with crowds attacking US embassies in over a dozen capitals. Describing the protests as “mindless violence,” Obama lumped them together with the September 11 attack by an Islamist militia on the US consulate and a CIA headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Obama declared these events “an assault on the very ideals upon which the United Nations was founded—the notion that people can resolve their differences peacefully; that diplomacy can take the place of war.”
What insolence! After a decade of US wars that have claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis and Afghans, the US president is the last person to lecture the people of the Middle East on how to “resolve their differences peacefully” and the advantages of diplomacy over war.
Obama added, “If we are serious about these ideals, we must speak honestly about the deeper causes of this crisis.” However, he did no such thing. Instead, he treated the anger against the US as merely the product of the crude anti-Islamic video “Innocence of the Muslims” and of those who promote “hatred of America, or the West, or Israel.”
There was nothing in the speech about Washington’s wars, its unconditional support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, or its reliance on dictatorial regimes and absolute monarchs to secure semi-colonial control over the region and its energy resources…
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/obam-s26.shtml
Actually, Glenn, what you’re witnessing is a tremendously skilled politician at work. I’m guessing the President is well-aware that some of his remarks about free speech would be greeted with well-placed scorn and contempt and outrage in the “Middle-East,” but any speech he gives now is meant for domestic consumption. The President is trying to get the terrorist attack on our embassy in Libya out of the news (at least the core truth of it), and he seems to have done just that for now. Democratic Party partisans and admirers certainly think his speech was terrific. Compare him to the insulting, crude, and idiotic Netanyahu and his Big Wiley E. Coyote Scary Iranian Bomb. It looks like Netanyahu has come completely unhinged, which is very bad for us and the rest of the planet, especially the “Middle-East.”
Obama is a neolib, neocon, smu, hypocritical, dissembling, deluded, race and class traitor, a hack who is persecuting free speech – even of true journalists, via the NDAA (Patriot Act) and the Espionage Act of 1917: Obama has used that 95 year old act to chill dissent and punish truth tellers more often than all previous presidents.
i’m wondering, is obama as smart as they say he is or are we as dumb as he thinks we are?
obama is capable of this kind of speech because as thom hartmann says “ceo’s and
politicians are sociopaths”. with a man who signed into law the ndaa only to have
it struck down by a federal judge. free speech is great except for the us. thanks for
defining this for us thom.
The best thing that can be said about Obama is that he is a greatly talented politician. As was immediately apparent to most readers of FAIR, he is no liberal, so why should he even pretend to be? The concept of freedom of speech has been changing all over the world for decades. As Morsi said in his speech to the UN, we want freedom of speech, but not without restrictions. Those restrictions could be very severe if the government is feeling threatened or the corporations begin to fear a movement which might put them back under the control of government, and government under the control of the people. One only has to observe demonstrations in various countries including the US to notice that the police are being used to beat the free speech out of anyone who says the wrong thing.
I notice something in the comments.Obama is on the outs with a lot of you people…Liberal as you may be.Fascinating!
TIM N I read your post.It did not get my Irish up(a change).One thing you left out though is your feelings on the Iranian leaders speech.Appreciate it if you would say how you felt about that love letter.
Final brief filed in arpaio corruption case in 9th circuit,,,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/109910222/Final-Brief-in-Arpaio-Corruption-Case-in-9th-Circuit
Here it is, AZ law enforcement engaging in felony obstruction of justice to protect a close friend and adviser of sheriff arpaio.
Time for state and federal law enforcement to put on their blindfolds in furtherance of the justice is blind motto — or is it law enforcement is blind when law enforcement are the criminals.