- Open Letter To Barack Obama
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- 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
(to Zionism)."
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- Between Hope And Reality
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- By Ralph Nader
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- Dear Senator Obama:
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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 news- paper 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."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.'"
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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 to visit a single
Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington
D.C. after9/11 to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a
frightened major religious group of innocents.
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- 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."
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- None of these comments and reports change your political
bigotry against Muslim-Americans -- even though your father was a Muslim
from Kenya.
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- 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 presidentJimmy 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.
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- 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!
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- 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.
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- Should you be elected President, it must be more than
an unprecedented upward career move follow-ing 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.
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- Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated
cowardly stands. "Hope" some say springs eternal." But not
when "reality" consumes it daily.
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- Sincerely,
- Ralph Nader
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- November 3, 2008
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