At 6:38 AM Eastern Standard Time, President Obama’s speech hit what the Wall Street Journal’s live bloggers called a “sensitive passage.” This one:
This is a guest post by David Adler.
I take no pleasure from the fact that right-wing pundits are lashing Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, over her two-part question to President Barack Obama last night. And yet Thomas deserves to be upbraided. The fact that she’s held up by liberals as a paragon of courage is an embarrassment. Drifting further toward the fringe every day, she certainly doesn’t speak for me.
Below are excerpts from the agenda of the new Obama-Biden Administration on Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”
He may have been singing slightly off-key, but U2 frontman Bono - who played at the Obama inauguration celebrations yesterday - got the politics absolutely right. In the middle of “Pride,” U2’s epic tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, whose memory is being honored across the US today, Bono, clearly loving the moment, told the crowd: “Not just an American dream - also an Irish dream, a European dream, African dream, Israeli dream, and also a Palestinian dream.” Brian Eno, who produced the U2 album “The Joshua Tree,” should take note. He - and you - can watch the clip of U2 here.
This is a guest post by David Adler.
John Pilger, the ultra-left New Statesman columnist, infamously said, in regard to the 2004 Iraq insurgency, that “we cannot afford to be choosy” - i.e., that people of the left must support the Baath/jihadi assassins and bombers because they are arrayed against the forces of Empire. He was hardly alone in this view; Arundhati Roy and the British MP George Galloway argued much the same.
A gray-haired, white-skinned, male journalist is savaging the first black President of the United States as an unreconstructed warmonger, under a headline lifted from the title of a Public Enemy track released back in 1988. Yes, it’s John Pilger.
The various attempts, as the Presidential campaign heated up, to depict Barack Obama as hostile to Israel had minimal impact on American Jews, 78 per cent of whom voted for him. Among young Jewish voters, as this informal AJC poll indicates, the percentage was even higher. Indeed, as we reported yesterday, wariness about an Obama administration is more pointed in the Arab and wider Islamic world. One reason why, today, all eyes are on Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who has been appointed as Obama’s Chief-of-Staff.
It was an astounding night in America and around the world. Even so, reality is quickly intruding into the jumble of elation, incredulity and anticipation which greeted Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States. Several news outlets report that Obama is not resting, but is solidly focused on his transition team - and, by extension, the issues they will face.
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