Zawahiri: Obama is the anti-Malcolm X
Ayman al-Zawahiri attacked Barack Obama in a video released on the internet on Tuesday. Fox News reprinted the whole transcript here. I'm a little bit confused by this step, since I thought the US networks had agreed under pressure from Bush only to carry excerpts from al-Qaeda, and the US elite has been deeply critical, to say the least, of Aljazeera for carrying 2-minute clips. (Of course, all this brouhaha is hypocritical, since Rupert Murdoch's satellite service in Asia carries both Aljazeera and Aljazeera English; Murdoch owns Fox News). Fox seems to be the only network carrying the full English text (which was provided by al-Sahab, the al-Qaeda video production company (see the videos below).
The headline in most comments on the video was that al-Zawahiri used a racist slur against Obama, calling him a "house Negro" and referring to the distinction Malcolm X made between pro-white slaves who lived next to the mansion, and the "field Negros" who toiled beneath the whip and hated their master.
In the video, al-Zawahiri does pointedly refer to Malcolm X's distinction. But he speaks in Arabic of "`abid al-bayt," "the house slave," and does not use the word "Negro" (which the al-Sahab translators are rendering 'zinji.') The connotations and implications are much the same, but it is not exact to say that al-Zawahiri used the phrase "house Negro" himself.
The Egyptian physician and mass murderer made a key error in his analysis, however, since if we were to take Malcolm X's parable seriously, Barack Obama would have to be assigned the role of the master.
In the past 50 years, the United States has, by dint of enormous daily ethical struggle, altered the dynamics of race. It is no longer the case that African-Americans only have a choice of serving under a white elite or rebelling against it. They can be senator or president in their own right. There is still a great deal of economic and educational inequality, and one election will not suddenly change that, but America's Apartheid days are gone. Al-Zawahiri, formed intellectually in the late 1960s, is stuck in a paradigm, of a worldwide revolution of people of color against the white global ruling class, which is nonsensical when Japan and China have the second and fourth largest economies, respectively, and when the United States has an African-American president.
Ironically 89 percent of the true heirs of Malcolm X, the contemporary American Muslim community, voted for Obama; and they had a 95 percent turnout, the highest in their history.
Al-Zawahiri celebrates what he sees as the US admission of defeat in Iraq (insofar as it has committed to leave by 2011). That al-Zawahiri can gloat about the withdrawal in this way underlines how foolish Bush and his cronies were to attempt to militarily occupy, over a period of several years, a major Arab Muslim country with a strong history of popular resistance to imperialism. Bush by his arrogance and ignorance granted this talking point to al-Qaeda.
Still, it has to be said that radical Sunni fundamentalism was never a majority tendency among Iraqi Sunnis, and appears to be spiralling down into insignificance. The real victor in Iraq is not al-Qaeda and its ideological soul mates, but rather the pro-Iranian Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Zawahiri viciously attacked Iran in his last video, and spoke darkly of an Iranian alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So if Bush was defeated in Iraq, so was al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda (insofar as their ideological soul mates, the Sunni radical fundamentalists there, have been largely rolled back).
Al-Zawahiri complains about Barack Obama's warm feelings for Israel and his willingness to pray alongside Jews, characterizing that gesture as a declaration of enmity toward Muslims. But Egypt and Jordan are majority-Muslim and they have peace treaties with Israel; and 65 percent of American Muslims believe that a peace settlement can be reached with Israel that is also fair to the Palestinians. So the issue cannot be one of simply enmity toward Islam (are Egyptians and Jordanians self-hating Muslims?)
The terrorist mastermind is even more scathing toward Obama's hopes of talking to Iran and of sending more troops to fight in Afghanistan. "That has failure written all over it," al-Zawahiri pronounced.
It is absolutely clear toward the end of the video that al-Zawahiri is petrified of Obama's popularity and is very afraid that he will be a game-changer in relations between the Muslim world and the United States. Hence his flailing around talking about house slaves, as though Obama were not (as of Jan. 20) himself the most powerful man in the world, catapulted into his position by nearly half of American whites (who voted for him in higher proportions than they did for Clinton and Kerry).
Al-Zawahiri has seen a lot of Muslim politics, and if he is this afraid of Obama, it is a sign that the new president has enormous potential to deploy soft power against al-Qaeda, and al-Zawahiri is running scared, trying to pretend it is still the 1960s, when it just isn't.
Hassan al-Subaihi argues that before the election, Arabs overwhelmingly supported Obama, but that his appointment of Israeli-American Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff has divided them into a number of camps, each with a different view of the new president. Ironically, he finds that Palestinian intellectuals are among the most realistic and yet positive about Obama. The least hopeful are the radical fundamentalists (e.g. Hamas) and the poorly educated.
Obama has the opportunity to be the most popular US president in the Middle East since Eisenhower. If he is wise, he will defeat al-Zawahiri not just by military means but by stealing away al-Zawahiri's own intended constituency. Obama is about building communities up; al-Zawahiri is about destroying them. If Obama can convince the Arab publics of this basic fact, he will win.
The Zawahiri video is subtitled in English:
The Zawahiri video, Part I:
And, here is Part II:
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/20/2008 12:09:00 AM
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Obama got elected by making it clear that he was as bloodthirsty and ready to slaughter brown people as any white person that wanted the job, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He is in fact exploiting the division between the privileged and the underclass in oppressed communities, specifically the black community, in service to the people that still run the United States and the world. It has not been unusual in American history for American blacks to be led by people who represented black people to the white establishment by telling that establishment what it wanted to hear and guiding the blacks into submission to its exploitation. Jews in World War 2 experienced the same in the leaders of the Judenraten.
Malcolm X would have instantly recognized that phenomenon here. Black people will be sent to kill and die in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and black people, along with the rest of the not-rich in the US, will continue to be ripped off at home to finance the American imperial project that Obama wholeheartedly supports - unless of course Obama does not mean a word he's been saying all this time. Can we assume that that is the case?.
There are some details wrong in Zawahiri's analysis, but there is little doubt how Malcolm X would analyze Obama's plans and what they will do to the black and brown people of the earth so that Obama can be the most powerful man in the world.
FOX News will fully cover anything that will create world-wide fear of Muslims. After all, one of their goals is to spread the war to Iran. The public has to be more frightened and disgusted for this to happen. Thus, FOX News spends hours a day spoon feeding the world propaganda as to why the war against any and all Muslim states must spread.
Until I read your post, I had no idea of the Malcom X connection with the concept of "house slave." The one point that I would like to put on the table relates to the political landscape in Jordan and Egypt. Although both governments have signed peace treaties with Israel, their peoples are not represented by these governments. In fact, these two governments are evolved (big police and intelligence) dictatorships. Until and when free political discourse is allowed to happen with total acceptance and respect for the outcome(even when one does not like it as in the victory of Hamas in Gaza) then one may easy be the victim of some past paradigm.
Juan, Obama is abeed al-beit simply and only because he surrendered the Muslim faith of his father for the Christianity of his white slavemaster. This isn't about politics and race, but faith. Our man Ayman doesn't care about race relations in America or the world, he cares about Islam. And President of the US or not, it is precisely the adoption of the Christian faith that keeps Obama enslaved and makes him abeed al-beit. In contrast, Malcom X is "honorable" because he rejected Christianity in favor of Islam.
That's Ayman's thought process here. And it's precisely why Obama is the anti-Malcolm X in our man Ayman's eyes. The speech was to remind the Muslim world that Obama is still the man who rejected his father's Islam in favor of Christianity [so don't get your hopes up, Muslim world]. Why in the heck do you think the faith of Obama and his father even came up?
Please, Juan, do a better job of understanding Ayman, I mean, he is the opposition, yes?
Juan, sorry, but I forgot to ask you to compare the video footage. Malcolm X praying at a mosque and Obama wearing a yarmulke. As I said, this is about the faith of some. And so, again, to the extent that Obama adopted Christianity in lieu of his father's Islam, he's abeed al-beit, unlike the "honorable" Mr. Malcolm X, who rejected Christianity in favor of Islam.
It's interesting, I think, that America's leader went from a "crusader" aka Bush the "decider," to a "betrayer" of the Muslim world in their eyes. What are the ideological implications of that?
Excellent commentary (especially about the relationship between Muslims and Jews); thanks for posting.
"Al-Zawahiri, formed intellectually in the late 1960s, is stuck in a paradigm, of a worldwide revolution of people of color against the white global ruling class..." The same can be said about Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
And so we can finally start engaging in the war against al-Qaeda and hitting them where it hurts!
But Egypt and Jordan are majority-Muslim and they have peace treaties with Israel; and 65 percent of American Muslims believe that a peace settlement can be reached with Israel that is also fair to the Palestinians. So the issue cannot be one of simply enmity toward Islam (are Egyptians and Jordanians self-hating Muslims?)
Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, but the people of both countries are much more hostile than the pro-Western dictators.
Iraq is democratic enough that recognition of Israel is completely off the table. Never even mentioned despite the $10 billion a month the US is paying to protect the Maliki government.
Maliki refused to speak ill of Hezbollah during the Lebanon war in front of the US congress while asking for money and arms from the US.
A democratic Egypt or Jordan would be at the very least as hostile towards Israel is Iraq, in Jordan's case much much more hostile because of Jordan's large Palestinian population.
Western commentators really do a poor job wrapping their minds around the fact that Israel is the bad guy to most people in the Middle East, which is demonstrated in poll after poll.
ref : “a paradigm... of a worldwide revolution of people of color against the white, global ruling class”
Interesting for us to pause for a moment and consider that this *IS* the answer to the question, "What is al-Qaeda?"
et Voilà! There it is, that most important realisation being that al-Qaeda = The Enemy is not a who, but a what : l'idée c'est tout. In this regard I agree with the Professor that Messrs. Bush and Cheney and all their AngloAmerican hardware was, in retrospect if anything a destructiveness self-inflicting; and this brutal old warmaking was not only incapable, but also inappropriate as a means to defeat that which really is our enemy, "al-Qaeda".
otoh, While all seemed dismal, and all their Armed Forces were rendered impotent, isolated and in wholly defensive posture, incompetent even as neo-colonial occupiers ~ The American people have, imho, by virtue of their uncorrupted vote, in one fell swoop defeated "al-Qaeda" : rendering it now impotent, isolated, and in a wholly defensive posture.
not only "The Enemy" but also "Victory"... has now / at last been defined.
imho, What Happens Next is not the question, "How do we achieve 'victory'?" Rather, imho it is important for the American people, and their leaders to ask: "How do we sustain this 'victory', apparent?"
Juan Cole asks, "Are Egyptians and Jordanians self-hating Muslims" for accepting peace with Israel? To Zawahiri and his ilk, the answer is an certain 'yes.' This is the legacy of Sayyed Qutb's willingness to declare the Muslim world to have returned to the ignorance of Islam (jahiliyya), making even ostensible Muslims into kafir (deniers of God). The punishment for such denial is death. It this power to declare who is and is not a 'true' Muslim which Qutb then and Bin Laden and Zawahiri today arrogate to themselves and which makes them singularly dangerous.
Does Bin Laden's silence on Obama imply that he is dead?
Juan, you were the one who pointed out that al-Zawahiri called Obama a slave not a negro. The Sunni's weren't defeated but bought off. They will be back when the checks stop.
Barack Obama's father had abandoned Islam and was an avowed atheist by the time he met his mother, so it is a bit difficult to think that Barack Obama ever had or felt any connection at all to Islam.
Juan Cole says "Al-Zawahiri, ..., is stuck in a paradigm, of a worldwide revolution of people of color against the white global ruling class." Yet Juan was the one who pointed out that al-Zawahiri call Obama "a slave" not a negro. Cole also says "radical Sunni fundamentalism was never a majority tendency among Iraqi Sunnis, and appears to be spiralling down into insignificance." But a power change in favor of a Shiite government will most likely not lead to Sunni complacence.
al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda have suffered no lose in Iraq. If Sunni's take money from the US instead of fighting it does nothing toward providing an Iraqi government in Baghdad. What will happen when the checks stop? For that matter the current people in power will be no ones choice except for perhaps the Iranians once the US leaves.
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