President Obama in Cairo, June 2009:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.
Protest in Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963, photo by Bill Hudson
Protest in Kufer Qaddoum, Palestine, March 16, 2012, photo from Popular Struggle Coordination Committee
(Ask yourself: Why would anyone want to assume the risks these two brave men assumed? What do they want? And who in these images, quoting President Obama, has “moral authority”?)
I thought it was significant when Obama in Cairo compared the struggle of Palestinians with the struggle of blacks in the US. But he did not get his own message. Whether the oppressed resist with violence or without it, they are forced to resist at all because they are oppressed. It is the oppressors who are in the wrong. If the oppressors gave up their insistence on privilege over others, there would be no need for resistance or struggle of any kind. But ever since Cairo, Obama has been on the side of oppression. Not a big surprise, but disappointing nevertheless.
where are the leashes on the second photo.
“Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed.”
King George III probably said: Americans must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed.
The American Revolution must have been unsuccessful !
King George would agree with Obama that: Peaceful protest is always best.
I think the Palestinians have been remarkably passive compared to anybody else who would have found themselves in their shoes. “There is always tomorrow” is a phrase they believe in.
“Mr. President, Palestine has heard you”
Good for Palestine, but I don’t think Obama cares.