[Reader-list] Nader to Obama

[Sanjay Kak]

While our hands are still aching from all the clapping, and our ears
ring from the applause, a worthwhile caveat from Ralph Nader.
Apologies for cross-posting

Sanjay Kak

_______________________

Open Letter to Sen. Obama

http://www.votenader.org/media/2008/11/03/lettertoobama/#

November 3, 2008

Open letter to Senator Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and
change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet
there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political
character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not
"hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status
quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous,
unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street
interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys.
Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this
supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your
unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these
large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it
be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your
presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants,
offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining
Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the
corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for
example) you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires
character, courage, integrity— not expediency, accommodation and
short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from
an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your
run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line
AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation,
blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the
Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank
and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007
issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed
by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the
Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a
detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of
Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful
resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with
the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to
the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the
Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed
negotiations with Hamas— the elected government in Gaza. Once again,
you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008
poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis
favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC
hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating
dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he
wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society
by the Israeli state."

During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45
minutes of your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no
visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media
on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the
illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and
the United Nations charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties
which during the past year have totaled one civilian casualty to every
400 Palestinian casualties on the Gaza side. Instead of a
statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement with
acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable
Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic
and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played
the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with
the feeling of much shock and little awe.

David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip
succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the
fact that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as
a candidate, but not as a President."

Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did
not utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement
and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for
millions of Palestinians. …Even the Bush administration recently
criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians
[see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's
assault on Lebanon as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend
itself.'"

In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly
criticized the Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza,
including attacks on "the heart of a crowded refugee camp… with
horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.

Israeli writer and peace advocate— Uri Avnery— described Obama's
appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for
obsequiousness and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to
sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a
vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will
allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to
Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged
his future— if and when he is elected president.," he said, adding,
"Of one thing I am certain: Obama's declarations at the AIPAC
conference are very, very bad for peace. And what is bad for peace is
bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the Palestinian people."

A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you
turned your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused
to send surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited
numerous churches and synagogues, you refused tovisit a single Mosque
in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington
D.C. after 9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a
frightened major religious group of innocents.

Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008
titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott),
citing examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all
walks of life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the
American dream. Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune
published an article by Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a
Mosque." None of these comments and reports change your political
bigotry against Muslim-Americans— even though your father was a Muslim
from Kenya.

Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or
even the mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to
demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter
from speaking at the Democratic National Convention. This is a
tradition for former presidents and one accorded in prime time to Bill
Clinton this year.

Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt,
but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid
Apartheid of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to
sideline him. Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy
Carter on this critical international problem, he was relegated to a
stroll across the stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing
of a film about the Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you,
Barack Obama!

But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of
American life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt
Gonzalez, on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the
100-million poor Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans,
and Latinos. You always mention helping the "middle class" but you
omit, repeatedly, mention of the "poor" in America.

Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented
upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that
spoke "change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration
power of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the
power from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over
by a black man who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and
abroad but challenges the forces of greed, dictatorial control of
labor, consumers and taxpayers, and the militarization of foreign
policy. It must be a White House that is transforming of American
politics— opening it up to the public funding of elections (through
voluntary approaches)— and allowing smaller candidates to have a
chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now
restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly
stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality"
consumes it daily.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader