[div class=excerpt style=background:#FEFEFF]Obama in Cairo: A Bush in Sheep's Clothing?
His speech shows little real change. In most regards his analysis maintains flawed American policies intact
by Ali Abunimah

Once you strip away the mujamalat - the courtesies exchanged between guest and host - the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama's intentions - he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can", there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and Islam" - the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.

Labelling America's "other" as a nebulous and all-encompassing "Islam" (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilise people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition - and the resistance it generates - has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with "Islam".

It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor's notion that "violent extremism" exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America's (and its proxies') exponentially greater use of violence before and after September 11, 2001. He dwelled on the "enormous trauma" done to the US when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq - those whom Munathar al-Zaidi's flying shoe forced Americans to remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of civilians who die each week in the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, or the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.

As President George Bush often did, Obama affirmed that it is only a violent minority that besmirches the name of a vast and "peaceful" Muslim majority. But he seemed once again to implicate all Muslims as suspect when he warned, "The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer."

Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation of Israel. "It is also undeniable," the president said, "that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation."

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?

He lectured Palestinians that "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed". He warned them that "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered." (Note: the last suicide attack targeting civilians by a Palestinian occurred in 2004)

Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered 1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping, fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? Did he think his listeners would not remember that the number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians targeted and killed by Israel has always far exceeded by orders of magnitude the number of Israelis killed by Arabs precisely because of the American arms he has pledged to continue giving Israel with no accountability. Amnesty International recently confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last November 4, prompting retaliatory rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates anything but a commitment to full truth-telling.

Some people are prepared to give Obama a pass for all this because he is at last talking tough on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In Cairo, he said: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

These carefully chosen words focus only on continued construction, not on the existence of the settlements themselves; they are entirely compatible with the peace process industry consensus that existing settlements will remain where they are for ever. This raises the question of where Obama thinks he is going. He summarised Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" as being the establishment of a "state". This has become a convenient slogan to that is supposed to replace for Palestinians their pursuit of rights and justice that the proposed state actually denies. Obama is already on record opposing Palestinian refugees' right to return home, and has never supported the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live free from racist and religious incitement, persecution and practices fanned by Israel's highest office holders and written into its laws.

He may have more determination than his predecessor but he remains committed to an unworkable two-state "vision" aimed not at restoring Palestinian rights, but preserving Israel as an enclave of Israeli Jewish privilege. It is a dead end.

There was one sentence in his speech I cheered for and which he should heed: "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/04/barack-obama-middleeast [/quote]


I read Obama's speech this morning. How pathetic. Only the hopelessly naive or uninformed could take O's duplicitous blather at face value.

"It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. And the current situation offers no prospect that life will improve... My vision is two states, living side by side in peace and security."

-- GW Bush, Rose Garden, 24 June 2002

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbushtwostatesolution.htm


Not a nickels worth of difference.

americans are so dumbed down now, they don't even realize they are being lied to and ripped off.

Reminds me of a song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Ar-woC5ys

GREEN DAY LYRICS

"American Idiot"

Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new mania
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Well maybe I'm the faggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along to the age of paranoia.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Don't want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's calling out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

and can step back and take a look at thing (after taking a nice breath).

The American people have been dumbed down. Moreover, the Powers That Be have succeeded in focusing most individuals' attention on some idiotic and somewhat-imaginary conflict between the prominent political parties. That way, the ordinary Janes and Joes don't see how badly they are being screwed by the System.

I'm not playing THAT game any longer.

It took me the last four years, since I joined PI, to realize how truly fucked we are. I learned so much in the first few months I was almost freaked out. Now I am getting used to being a slave/serf in amerika.

:(

Zionist Spin & Orwellian Holocaust Denial

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/31091/42/


President Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) has made a pro-Zionist motherhood speech to the Muslim World that ignored horrendous US Alliance crimes, implied (like George Orwell’s Big Brother) that ongoing war is peace and offered a Palestinian State when Apartheid Israel agrees to it.

Obama’s speech (see the transcript here) was full of nice politically correct expressions of love for Islam and Muslims but dishonestly evaded the central issue of ongoing US Alliance occupation and devastation of Muslim countries and abusive mass imprisonment of the conquered populations of these Occupied Territories including Somalia (not mentioned), Occupied Palestine, Syria (not mentioned), Lebanon (not mentioned), Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan and US robot-bombed NE Provinces of Pakistan.

In 1945 the Germans adopted a post-war protocol that can be summarized by the acronym CAAAA (C4A) and involving Cessation of the killing; Acknowledgment of the crimes; Apology for the crimes; Amends for the crimes; and Assertion “never again to anyone”. Unfortunately the only US crime that Obama actually admitted to in his speech was US involvement in the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953.

As for the Iraqi Genocide (2.3 million post-invasion excess deaths, 6 million refugees) all that Obama acknowledged was that “Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world … events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible“ i.e. it’s just a learning curve for America and water under the bridge because some nice Americans didn’t think we should have done it and perhaps next time America may talk first before killing millions of people.

Before proceeding further with detailed analysis of Obama’s speech it is useful to simply present the horrendous statistics detailing the human cost of the genocidal US-backed Apartheid Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the genocidal US Alliance occupations of Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan.

As of April 2009, in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories:
1. post-invasion non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 3.2 million, respectively;
2. post-invasion violent deaths total about 10,000, 1.3 million and 2-4 million, respectively;
3. total post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 2.3 million and 3-7 million, respectively;
4. post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; and
5. refugees total 7 million, 5-6 million and 3-4 million, respectively.

This constitutes a Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention; and egregious war crimes due in part to Occupier war criminal non-supply of life-sustaining food and medical requisites demanded unequivocally by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Thus the Gaza Concentration Camp has been under US-backed Israeli blockade for 2 years and according to WHO the “total annual per capita medical expenditure” permitted by the Occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is US$124 and US$29, respectively, as compared to US$6,714 for the US (see “Pro-Zionist Western holocaust denial”).

Annual excess deaths can be estimated from UN data for the major sectors of the American Empire: Afghanistan (483,000), Haiti (30,0000), Iraq (59,000), the Occupied Palestinian Territory (6,000), and Somalia (77,000), for a total of 655,000 non-violent avoidable deaths per year and 1,795 each day. Obama has only been in office since 20 January 2009 but it can be been estimated that in his first 4 months alone excess deaths in these Occupied Territories totalled about 220,000 and avoidable under-5 infant deaths totalled about 140,000 (see “Hey, hey USA, how many kids did you kill today? Answer: 1,000”). Obama’s War in Pakistan has created 2.5 million refugees this year (see: here ). Obama is doing in Pakistan what the British did in the Kenya in the 1950s and what Obama scrupulously ignores in a process of cowardly holocaust denial (1 million in enclosed villages; 0.1 million killed in custody or otherwise; 1.1 million excess deaths).

Obama divided his speech into 7 sections and it is convenient to follow this division.

1. Violent extremism

Obama says: “The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms” but . you can’t get more violent extremism than the US alliance killing about 1,800 people every day.

Obama reiterates the Bush Allegation that Muslims responsiblity for 9/11. However the discovery of unexploded nanothermite explosive in all sample of World trade Center dust analysed points the finger squarely at the US and its “dirty tricks” Israeli terrorist helpmates (see “Is US responsible for 9-11? Scientists find nanothermite in WTC dust”).

Even if you accept the Bush-Obama version of 9/11 (men in caves killing 3,000 Americans) does that justify the US killing 1,800 people per day (1,200 infants oer day forever? What happened to Obama’s Cairo epiphany of “the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible“ ? And why mass murder Afghans when the official Bush-Obama version of 9-11 states that no (0) Afghans were actually directly involved in the events of 9-11?

The minimum estimate of post-invasion Occupied Afghan excess deaths is 3 million and accordingly the reprisals death ratio justified by Obama is 3,000,000 Afghans/3,000 9-11 victims = 1,000, about 100 times higher than the “enemy civilians”/”dead Germans” reprisals death ratio of merely 10 ordered by Nazi leader Adolph Hitler in 1944 and executed precisely in the 1944 Rome Ardeatine Caves Massacre.

As discussed above, Obama made no apology for the Iraq War (“ a war of choice”), made no Acknowledgement of the 2.3 million post-invasion excess deaths and calmly told the Muslim World that he will keep the killing going for another 3 years or so.

Obama actually makes a confession of war criminality in his speech, alluding to “aid” of $7.5 billion for Pakistan and $2.8 billion for Occupied Afghanistan – yet Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War demand that the Occupier does everything “to the fullest extent of the means available it” to keep its Conquered Subjects alive and that means for 27 million Occupied Afghans at least the same annual per capita medical expenditure as for metropolitan USA i.e. $6,714 per person per year x 27 million Afghans = $180 billion every year rather than the paltry $2.8 billion offered.

Obama is currently the World’s #1 violent extremist.

Published on Sunday, June 7, 2009 by The Independent/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/07-2


by Robert Fisk

Go into the average newspaper office and you'll find the reporters staring at Sky News or the BBC or Al-Jazeera International.

But visit the studios of Sky News, the BBC or Al-Jazeera International, and you'll discover that all the journalists there are reading newspapers. Its an odd form of osmosis which - being an old-fashioned reporter - I'm not very happy about. I still believe, along with an encouraging number of young Arab and Israeli reporters, that we've got to be out on the streets, just as I was when I started in journalism in the Blyth office of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. So Fisk was prowling the streets of Cairo this week, hunting for Obama and Lady Hilary.

A colleague gave me Obama's detailed schedule, and there was the key: "11.50 am: POTUS and Sec of State Clinton tour mosque." Poor old Obama, I thought. Surely he didn't deserve to be reduced to a codename like POTUS - until dimwit Fisk realised this stood for "President of the United States". How very American. The Sultan Hassan mosque was just below the citadel and with my faithful driver Amr (the Egyptian equivalent of my even more faithful driver Abed in Beirut), we swept through the police-heavy streets of Cairo to track down the POTUS and his lady. So empty were the drab boulevards of downtown Cairo that we drove at 60mph. I should add that Amr comes from the Citadel area of Cairo and knew every back street to avoid the thousands of cops thronging the usually filthy highways of this raving hot city. And we got there. The mosques and the great Citadel of the Mamlukes baked in the noontime sun and around them lounged or stood to attention or snooped thousands of uniformed or plain-clothes mukhabarat security police. They stood in the street, they stood atop 13th century mosques with rifles, they sat glowering in tea-shops. They had emptied the place of real people, genuine Egyptians, and had "become" Cairo. The plain-clothes lads - no women, of course - were all dressed in horrible 1970s suits with gun butts protruding from the bottom of their jackets. Each wore an outrageously florid tie of indeterminate quality.

"You cannot stay here," one of them muttered at me - I had planned to hide in a local tea-house until I discovered that all the tea-drinkers were cops - "and anyway, they're going through the other gate". Thanks mate. And sure enough, round the corner were a hundred more officers. There were police generals and police colonels and police captains and a vast horde of black uniformed security men (all standing to attention with their backs to the road). One of the generals had so much sparkling braid on his hat that I feared it might fall off because of the weight of gold.

And they were cheerful. This foolish, obviously mad Englishman, wandering around in the midday sun, was a source of amusement to these bored men. I've come to see the POTUS, I explained. One of them examined my press card. "Fisk! ," he shouted. "I read what you write about us." This was not great news since I hadn't been terribly kind about his president of late - but I think he was lying. He did admit to me, though, that those ghastly police ties were all bought by the authorities. I had thought as much.

I found only one other journalist there, a friendly Egyptian photographer for Reuters who helped to talk me through the last checkpoints until there we were, bang in front of the entrance to the mosque. "They're on their way!" one of the thugs shouted. And a swishing convoy of black limousines was suddenly upon us, three of them sporting huge American and Egyptian flags. There were 32 security vehicles in all, some of them with Egyptian gunmen leaning half out of the window with their rifles.

A glimpse of the POTUS was enough, a lithe, athletic, tall figure beside a dumpy little old lady - that's what happens when the "Sec of State" wants to appear alongside her boss - and they were gone, followed by a trail of hop-skip-and-jump White House press corps girls and boys trying to keep up. Above them all, on the mosque walls, were massive, ancient gashes in the stones, shellfire from a much earlier age. Did the Egyptians, I wonder, tell the POTUS who performed this sacrilege? For the culprit was another young and powerful Western leader, fascinated by the Middle East: Napoleon Bonaparte.

Hang in there; what we are doing is making a difference, step by step. You are playing a big role in keeping this website going (posting threads, helping to moderate). This, in turn, helps build the network of independent progressives. It's very important and effective work (plus, you're raising two fine kids)!

:hug:

I appreciate your support more than I can say.

:hug:

President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo, Egypt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaxZPiiKyMw

http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/Alex-Grey-Barack-Obama6.jpg
http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/PharaohObama1.png
http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/image5062716x.jpg
http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/obama_sphinx-010709.jpg
http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/3308042850_45b6aecc09.jpg


http://waywardthinking.multiply.com/journal/item/303/Obama_18th_Dynasty_Egyptian_Pharaoh

You know Seemslikeadream there are conspiracy theorists who say the same people have been in power since the days of Egypt! Yikes!

In a weird coincidence I was watching CNN tonight, and apparently on a tour of the pyramids Obama noticed a hieroglyphic that looked like him (he pointed it out to Axelrod, Rahmbo, the whole bloodthirsty gang)... If any of this is true, it seems to me Obama wouldn't have made a big deal of this image (why would he want us to catch on to what the PTB are up to, lol).

maybe before that, do you know there are some people that believe the Sphinx is way older than what is accepted as fact?

Check out Graham Handcock sometime I've posted a couple of his videos here in the Video forum and Brave New World
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/06Pa9uQe7Kadk/610x.jpg
http://thealienproject.blogspot.com/2009/01/obama-reincarnation-of-pharoah.html

Are Barack and Michelle Obama the reincarnation of Pharoah Akhenaton and Queen Nefertiti of Ancient Egypt?

Reincarnation, literally means "to be made flesh again." It is a doctrine or metaphysical belief that some essential part of a living being (in some variations only human beings) survives death to be reborn in a new body. This essential part is often referred to as the spirit or soul, the "higher" or "true" self, "divine spark", or "I". According to such beliefs, a new personality is developed during each life in the physical world, but some part of the self remains constant throughout the successive lives.

Akhenaton, his royal name Amenhotep in English means Effective Spirit of Aten, first known as Amenhotep IV. He is especially noted for attempting to compel the Egyptian population in the monotheistic worship of Aten, although there are doubts as to how successful he was at this. He was born to Amenhotep III and his Chief Queen Tiye and was their younger son. Akhenaten was not originally designated as the successor to the throne until the untimely death of his older brother, the Crown Prince Thutmose.

Amenhotep IV succeeded his father after Amenhotep III's death at the end of his 38-year reign, possibly after a short coregency lasting between either 1 to 2 years. Suggested dates for Akhenaten's reign (subject to the debates surrounding Egyptian chronology) are from 1353 BC-1336 BC or 1351 BC–1334 BC. Akhenaton's chief wife was Nefertiti, made world-famous by the discovery of her exquisitely moulded and painted bust, now displayed in the Altes Museum of Berlin, and among the most recognised works of art surviving from the ancient world. After his death and the restoration of traditional religious practice, he and his immediate successors were ignored and excised from history by later rulers. Akhenaton himself is usually referred to as 'the enemy'.

Amenhotep IV changed His name to Akhenaton after receiving a vision from Ra (Re) the Sun God. Akhenaton outlawed all Gods in the Kingdoms of Egypt except for Aten, The Sun Disk God. As Pharaoh, Akhenaten was the High Priest of Re (Ra). He also believed that he was the Son of God Re (Ra). Akhenaten was the "forefather" of Christianity and Judaism. These religions believe in One God (Deutoronomy 6:4).

:hug:

We must continue taking small steps, which lead to something bigger, and then something bigger than that ..

Oh yes, I've heard that about the Sphinx, there are even people who think that advanced technological human societies have existed before on Earth. I really want to read [link:www.mcremo.com/|Forbidden Archaelogy], it's a book that's been on my TO READ list for awhile, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Oklahoma Cover-up
http://www.viewzone.com/oklahoma.southend.html

yea I want to read that also, in fact I will check if my library can get it for me today.

There are a bunch of his interviews at youtube, here's just one of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpj7ybNfaS8


"The Flight Into Egypt" by Timothy C. Ely


http://www.timothyely.com/images/flight_cover_big.jpg


First Edition, published in 1995 by Chronicle Books as a facsimile of a unique manuscript book by Timothy C. Ely. Full color throughout. Includes Foreword by Terence McKenna, Introduction by Timothy C. Ely, and an interview of Ely by Steven Clay of Granary Books in New York City. 56 pages, 14 1/4 x 11 1/8 inches. ISBN: 0-8118-0620-0



http://www.timothyely.com/pdf/TimothyCEly.pdf


TIMOTHY C. ELY
Timothy C. Ely (b. 1949), manuscript bookmaker, found early his inspiration in UFOs, comic books, and arcane religious artifacts. After work in painting and design, he traveled to Japan and Europe with a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts (1981), training in traditional eastern and western methods of bookmaking.

Engaging techniques both traditional and unusual, from watercolor and embossing to metalwork and tooling, Ely makes books inspired by conceptual art and the mind-bending landscapes of sacred geometry, alchemy, and particle physics. His published titles include The Flight Into Egypt: Binding the Book (Chronicle, 1995) and Synesthesia (Granary Books, 1992), with text by the late ethnopharmacologist Terence McKenna. Ely's unique and editioned books can be found in museum and library collections worldwide. He lives and works in eastern Washington state.
www.centerforbookarts.org/archive/bio.asp?artistID=12[/quote]



http://www.almaleh.com/flight.htm#


http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/ely4-1.gif



http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/ely3.gif




seems to me the Sphinx body was originally meant to be a dog not a cat

yes this is the one he saw

http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n67/seemslikeadream/image5062716x.jpg

http://adbassania.com/images/BlackPharoahs.jpg

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text.html