BARACK OBAMA gave a pretty clear defence of the universal human right to be an obnoxious, blasphemy-spewing jerk at the United Nations today. One of the interesting parts of watching the speech (video here, full text here), for me, was trying to figure out which audiences different parts of the speech were addressed to, or how the same sections might play to different audiences. On the one hand, you had the actual people physically present in the hall, who are probably the oddest, toughest, and at the same time probably the least significant audience for the speech. These are, after all, diplomats; they aren't really supposed to have opinions or sentiments that can be moved by an address. Gatherings of international diplomats and functionaries like the UN General Assembly are by their nature very strange crowds, highly conservative, and in general only responsive to organisationally approved platitudes which they know they can applaud because they've already been voted for repeatedly in universal declarations or in a goals document named for a summit in some equatorial capital two decades ago.
I thought I detected a nod to this crowd when Mr Obama quoted Mahatma Gandhi: "Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit." The correct move here was to couch the American defence of the right to blasphemy in the words of a hero of the non-aligned movement whom even the Egyptians might have to applaud, lest they piss off the Indians. Nobody can be against Gandhi! So it's a safe applause line, for anybody except a funky postmodern anti-anti-colonialist like Dinesh D'Souza; but I doubt he was in the audience. And I thought something similar was going on with this sequence:
The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.
It's not always a safe applause line to bring up girls' educational rights as part of a discussion of religious tolerance and civil rights in the Muslim world. Except, that is, at the United Nations, where every country present has explicitly ratified girls' educational rights in various universal declarations and the goals documents named for the summits in the equatorial capitals, which they signed in part because they didn't think they'd actually mean anything. It is the humanitarian politician's beautiful art to exploit such settings and carelessly made promises in order to needle these countries a few centimetres closer to actually educating their girls.
So much for the audience in the room. One reason such audiences of foreign diplomats and functionaries tend to be a little bored or abstracted at these gatherings, though, is that much of what speechifying national leaders say isn't actually addressed to them. It is addressed to constituents back in their own countries. In America right now, for reasons I can barely follow myself, Mr Obama's constituents are wrapped up in an argument over whether he spends too much time condemning people who insult the Prophet Muhammad, and not enough time condemning Muslim extremists for using such insults as a pretext to commit acts of political violence. So, much of Mr Obama's speech was devoted to checking boxes in the American political debate to certify that, yes, he defends freedom of expression, and, no he doesn't think it's ever justifiable to kill people or blow things up because somebody insulted your religion.
Writing this, I realise I'm saying something odd here: I'm assuming that when Mr Obama says,
[T]here is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There is no video that justifies an attack on an Embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.
...he's not actually talking to violent Muslim protestors, or even to residents of Muslim countries who may sympathise with violent protestors but to Americans who are susceptible to accusations that Barack Obama has not sufficiently denounced violent Muslim protestors. And I may be wrong about that. To be clear, I found Mr Obama's speech cogent, right, sensitive, sophisticated and moving. it may be that he really is, at least in part, addressing the better-educated, higher-information citizens of the Arab world when he says (and I'm repeating some of the above lines so we can see them in context):
It is time to leave the call of violence and the politics of division behind. On so many issues, we face a choice between the promise of the future, or the prisons of the past. We cannot afford to get it wrong. We must seize this moment. And America stands ready to work with all who are willing to embrace a better future.
The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, and that is the vision we will support.
These words could, I suppose, actually be addressed to Arab citizens. But even if they are, I don't think they'll be widely heard. Certain well-educated segments of Arab elites may watch the speech, it may be picked up to some extent in the Arab press, and that could be part of a useful conversation, I suppose, within a narrow circle. But the people who rioted over "The Innocence of Muslims", obviously, are vanishingly unlikely to hear anything Mr Obama said today. if they do, it will be in the form of a sentence or two that can be plucked out of context in order to create offence for the purpose of mobilisation, much as they used the film trailer itself. And that's what I've found so misguided about criticisms of Mr Obama (such as this post by Doug Mataconis) on the grounds that he failed to sufficiently defend freedom of speech or condemn the use of violence in response to blasphemy over the past week. Who was he supposed to be talking to? It seems to me that this is a call for Mr Obama to say something in a conversation that does not exist.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong, and there is a real politically active Arab citizenry that will see Mr Obama's speech today and engage with it in some way. I hope so!
(Photo credit: AFP)
via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/barack-obama-united-nations?fsrc=gn_ep
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