Message to Obama: Wake up

AbdulBari Atwan, noting that Obama has failed to condemn the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, grants that the administration is still in its early days, but says a bad beginning can only lead to a worse result. And he explains.

It is nice that the new president ended his country's war on terror, recognizing that it cannot be won, the extent of the damage that it had done to his country's image, and its financial and economic drain. But it would have been better if he had [spoken about] Israeli terror as well...

Ending the war on "terror" without ending the Israeli terrorism that has been continuing for 60 years--and under the protection of the United States--will lead to the appearance of new Arab and Islamic terror, more serious and more fierce, because those children that have lost their siblings and their mothers and fathers and witnessed the Israeli planes unleash their heat on them--these children will be more fierce in their vengeance, justified and legitimate in all positive and divine law, if they remain helpless and without hope or future.

The slaughter in Gaza was not only destructive of the culture of peace and justice; it also revitalized the culture of resistance and strengthened it throughout the Islamic and Arab world, and it exposed the moral collapse of the West and of America in particular in its ugliest form. And if the new American president and his team fail to recognize this plain fact, then all of the public protestations about improving their country's extremely ugly image in the Islamic world will be in vain.

We still have a glimmer of hope that the new American president will have the ability to effect the necessary changes in his country's policies...

not, he says, because of who he is, but because he should realize that a continuation of the policy of demanding concession after concession from the Palestinians under the pretext of a "peace process" will only be damaging to the interests of the United States, which is in particular need of stability and security in order to bolster its collapsing economy and its declining status in the world.

And the Palestinians, he concludes, don't need donors' conferences, but rather a conference that will re-establish international law and will say to the Israelis: You have become a burden to the West morally, politically, and in the security sense. You have become a threat to the stability of the world with your crimes of terror against innocent people. And these are crimes that if they continue will foster an extremism and extremist groups in the future that will make "AlQaeda" seem moderate by comparison.