The truth behind Obama’s speech in Cairo

As they drafted his speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo yesterday, President Obama's speech writers strove to suggest that cordiality towards Islam is securely embedded in America's cultural history.

The first Muslim congressman, Obama told his vast audience across the Muslim world, was sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Koran.

No names were mentioned, but this would have been Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat elected in 2000. At Johnson's victory night rally the local crowd shouted "Allahu Akhbar!". During the race Johnson understandably downplayed past associations with the Nation of Islam.

Obama also pointed out that Morocco had been the first nation to recognise the infant United States, signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, which declared that the US had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. The second US President, John Quincy Adams, reiterated that America had no quarrel with Islam.

China will be upset that Obama credited Islam with printing and navigationIt's a stretch. As my father Claud famously said: "Never believe anything till it is officially denied." Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states.

America needed free access to the Mediterranean and the Barbary 'pirates' controlled the sea lanes and, furthermore, had several hundred thousand Christian slaves, all no doubt using the opportunity of captivity to imbibe the first principles of algebra, whose invention Obama took the opportunity in Cairo to lay at the feet of the mathematicians of Islam.

He also credited Islam with the invention of printing and navigation which should surely require the Chinese People's Republic to withdraw its ambassador in Washington DC in formal diplomatic protest.

An early version of the Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key, written in 1805 amid the routing of the Barbary states, offered a view of Islam markedly different from Obama's uplifting sentiments in Cairo:

In conflict resistless each toil they endur'd,
Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war's desolation:
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur'd
By the light of the star-bangled flag of our nation.
Where each flaming star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turban'd head bowed to the terrible glare.
Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

In 1814 Key rehabbed this doggerel as the Star Spangled Banner. So America's national anthem began as a gleeful tirade against the Mahommedans. And of course every member of the US Marine Corps regularly bellows out its anthem, beginning: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli".

In short, America's march to Empire was minted in the crucible of anti-Islamic sentiment. This is not to detract from Obama's laudable efforts to rewrite history into a parable of tolerance and mutual respect, but it signals the problem with presidential speeches professing moral purpose of the purest ichor.

It's like a Scottish comedian some years ago, who used to begin: "They're calling Glasgow the Athens of the North." Pause. Incredulous wag of the head. "Athens of the North? Come on!"

Probably Obama's speech will be most vivid in its impact not across Islam but throughout the large portions of America that remain Christian in basic assumption.

I spent a large portion of Wednesday in a car radiator repair shop in a small town here in northern California. The proprietor is a man of conservative views.

As he dunked a radiator in a tank of terrifying green liquid on which floated a small wooden duck, he said with gloomy glee: "You see that Obama's saying America isn't a Christian nation? You see that? Well, the Founders were Christian! The pledge of allegiance calls us 'One nation under God'! And, it says right here on the dollar bill, 'In God we trust'." He winched the radiator out of the green poison and the duck bobbed up and down.

'In God we trust' was first put on coins amid a surge of religious sentiment

His facts were off, just like Obama's. Many of the Founders, Jefferson pre-eminently, were Deists at most. The phrase 'One nation under God' was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (drafted in 1892) in 1954, during the Cold War.

President Eisenhower explained that "in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war."

'In God we trust' was first put on coins in the early 1860s amid a surge of religious sentiment in the Civil War. A pastor from Pennsylvania successfully urged the phrase's addition 'to relieve us of the ignominy of heathenism'. It disappeared and reappeared on metal money down the decades.

Teddy Roosevelt thought it was cheap hucksterism, writing that "it seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins."

In 1955 Congress passed a law requiring the phrase to be on all US currency since "in these days when imperialistic and materialistic Communism seeks to attack and destroy freedom, it is proper" to "remind all of us of this self-evident truth" that "as long as this country trusts in God, it will prevail."

Obama's calls for mutual tolerance were replaced by talk of America's greatness

Obama, who can parade his Christian beliefs when it suits him, was historically on the money by quoting in Cairo what was in fact America's unofficial motto in the early years: 'E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.'

Given the acrid tirades of my radiator man and of right-wing radio commentators on Obama's speech, it was certainly bracing to listen to a black American president evoke his childhood in Indonesia: "I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk."

But Obama's initial, irreproachable calls for mutual tolerance and respect were soon overwhelmed by his boilerplate about America's greatness and the need for an alliance of tolerant religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism, in case you're wondering) against 'terror'.

"I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States," Obama declared in Cairo, "and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year."

Sharply in the minds of many Muslims listening here would have been the fate of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih - a 31-year old Yemeni who had been in a wire cage since February, 2002 (more than seven years) without charges and declared by his US military jailers "an apparent suicide". 

Salih, on hunger strike, was down to 85lb. Torture is certainly the label any morally balanced person would attach to his travails and it's quite reasonable to speculate that his end came amid yet another attempt to forcibly feed him.

Obama's audience would have been well aware too that even if – a big 'if' – Guantanamo does get shut down, its inmates will endure similar horrors in Bagram, and that Obama favours imprisonment, permanent if necessary, of enemy combatants, without charges or trial.

Obama's talk of the evils of al-Qaeda’s "terror" will have fallen ironically on the ears of Palestinians in Gaza earlier this year, or of Afghans still seething at the loss of civilians in US bombing raids. The noble pledges about economic assistance to the Muslim world sound hollow against the realities of how US aid really gets administered, starting with the huge sums filched by the 'non-profit' aid agencies.

Least credible to any Muslim would have been the ludicrous "balanced" passages about Israel and Palestine and the measured calls to Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza to disdain violence and swap formal recognition of Israel for... for what? Pledges by the Netanyahu government to build more settlements?

The Knesset wants to imprison people who deny that Israel is a Jewish state"Among some Muslims," Obama declared, "there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld... Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.”

This came at the end of a week in which the Israeli Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish state.

The private member's bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the 'Jewish Home' party, stipulates one year in prison to anyone who publishes "a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State".

As the veteran Zionist, former Knesset member and peace activist Yuri Avnery writes: "One can foresee the next steps. A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognise Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State."

"They want it to be a state of all its citizens – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders."

The bill now goes to the Legal Committee of the Knesset. Avnery says flatly within a few weeks or months, it will be the law of the land.

The bill, Avnery notes, does not single out Arabs explicitly – even if this is its clear intention, and all those who voted for it understood this. It also prohibits Jews from advocating a change in the state's definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas.

Avnery concludes: "One can only imagine what would happen in the US if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America."

There are fine words. There are facts on the ground, and as so often they too often strayed far from each other in Obama's big speech.  One 1,000lb bomb trumps 10,000 words on rhetoric about peace.

For his next speech on this theme let me offer a very inspiring illustration of inter-confessional tolerance at work in a great cause.

Around 930 AD the dowager Queen Toda of Navarre, a Christian, appealed to the caliphate in Cordoba, beseeching 'Abd al-Rahman III to help her slim down her son Sancho I, who had been abandoned by his subjects in Navarre because he was too fat to ride a horse and thus unable to display himself properly as a kingly warrior. The caliph sent word he had this terrific Jewish doctor and promptly dispatched to Navarre his top court medic, a Jew called Hasday b Shaprut.

Apparently the Shaprut Diet did the trick. A year later Sancho was back on the throne. E pluribus unum, in the form of one thinned down Sancho. ·