Brother Bailo,

 

Thanks for the forward.

I listened to President Obama's interview withe Al-Arabiya and unfortunately, while the message is somewhat encouraging but the truth of the matter is that unless the U.S is willing to address "the elephant in the room", I am afraid that no amount of nice words will suffice to bring about meaningful change in the Palestinian/Israeli relationship and by extension, U.S relations with the Middle East and other Islamic nations.

The elephant in the room that cannot be side-stepped is that:

 

The U.S has always vowed that they will support Isreal's position and President Obama has professed the same. U.S policy regarding the Isreali/Palestinian issue is one and the same as that of Isreali.

 

The Jewish state was established by the deliberate displacement of an an entire people who were then relegated to refugee camps for generation upon generation, and these people want their land back.

This makes sense and no people anywhere on this globe will tolerate that and no honest, intelligent person can say they do not see the injustice that the Palestinians have been and continue to be subjected to and why they refuse to accept anything less than the return of their land.

 

The U.S gives Isreal billions of dollars worth of weapons which they use daily in their efforts to eliminate the Palestian people.

 

The U.S and other western nations work in concert with Isreal in ensuring that there is a media blackout when the Jewish state sets out on their enthnic cleanising exercises in Gaza and elsewhere in the Palestinian territory, so that the general public around the World will not see what is going on because they are well aware that it is ugly and can never be justified by those who claim that they stand for and protect justice, equality and human rights. The Isrealis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews and it is even worse because this  time around, nations around the World know about it and aid them in this atrocity by being silent, by helping them to keep these horrors from the public media and by supplying them with the weapons they use.

 

The U.S refuses to acknowledge that the Palestinian people have a right to choose their own leaders and not accept a puppet regime although they say they are the bastion of democracy.

 

One cannot justify  and support such blatant injustices, speaking with forked tongues and be taken seriously as an honest broker.

 

So you see, unless the conversation includes these bread and butter issues which are the actual problem, anything else is just window dressing and the problem with that is the people they are addressing are not exactly fools.

President Obama is an intelligent man and he knows that the real problems are, however, it does not look like anything will change as far as this issue is concerned and this is very dissappointing but not suprising. Once he mentioned in his AIPAC speech (and repeated many times since) the usual U.S position of blind support of the Isreali agenda which is comprised of continued brutality on the Palestinians to complete the job of driving them away from their homeland, the dye was cast and the conversation over.

Jabou Joh

 

Obama's conciliatory messages to Moslems: Obama: U.S. not your enemy - Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090127/pl_politico/18016   Bailo ============================================================ Yahoo! News http://news.yahoo.com/

To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html