[Nabil Al-Hadithy heads Berkeley's toxic management division addressing hazardous waste problems. He graduated in Geology from University of London in 1975 and obtained Master's Degree from Cranfield University in Material Science in 1977 and doctorate in Welding Technology in 1982. He joined City of Berkeley in 1993 as HazMat Inspector and then became HazMat Manager. An Iraqi, he voted in the country's elections.]

Obama delivered a complex speech on June 4th in Cairo to the Muslim and Arab people. Before an Arab can discuss this speech with an American audience, we have to speak a common language, which we don't. To this end I will give some background on personalities, the power of the pro-Israel organizations and their lobby and histories from my perspective, which may enable us to communicate.

America’s favorite liberal expert on the Middle East is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Friedman is a liberal on all things but Israel. In September 2001, he told NPR that the attack on the US was because Arabs hate America and Israel, because they are envious and jealous of our democracies and that this hate “is the mother’s milk of these people”. This spawned a worldwide following of racist weblogs, these memorable words became the rallying cry of the right wing. Few ascribe these racist slogans to America’s liberal Middle East sage. Thus, I was appalled recently to hear Friedman brag that he was given an opportunity to advise President Obama immediately before his historic speech in Cairo.

The depth of misunderstanding and even enmity between the west and Muslims runs deep. You would need to know the 43rd President of the US left this nation as a police state for its Muslim and Arab minoirities. We were handled according to a Neoconservative vision, a vision born in Israel. Obama is a pragmatist and knows the seat of power in this country. He brought to his inner circle those who represent power: Geithner for the bankers; Solis for the emerging Hispanic vote; Axelrod, Emmanuel and Clinton for the Zionists. Obama’s Chief of Staff (an Israeli) is the son of a Jewish terrorist. Emmanuel's father recently promised Israel that that his son would properly influence Obama on Zionism thusly "What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.” Rahm distanced himself from his father’s statement, he must have had some meeting of the minds with Obama to tackle the pro-Israel lobby on the subject of Jewish settlements. But I suspect Emmanuel’s support has limits.

Obama had to address the subject of Palestine when addressing 1.5 billion Muslims. The non-existence of Palestine is due entirely to the pro-Israel lobby and their influence on US governments. Obama gave little in his speech to Muslims, and was still attacked by Zionists. Arye Eldad, a National Union Keneset Member said "Obama shockingly equated the destruction of European Jewry to the suffering Arabs brought upon themselves when they declared war on the nascent state of Israel". Krauthammer, of the Washington Post, condemned Obama for connecting Palestinian misery to the Israeli occupation and worse, likening Palestinian plight to other occupied or enslaved peoples.

Zionists have reached exalted powers in the United States and anyone from a teacher to a congresswoman will pay be targeted by a smear campaign for a perceived infraction of their priorities. This Zionist industry receives government funds, determines school curricula, limits free speech and even the courts are afraid to put their members in jail when found spying against the US. Zionists are allowed to police universities for politically incorrect instruction, and they have placed organizations that oppose Israel or Zionism on terror lists by executive order, and made anti-Zionists unemployable.

The Zionist industries benefit from the scepter of racism in real and intangible ways. Individuals and the state of Israel are compensated billions by Germany for war crimes sixty five years after WWII. European banks are forced to pay billions in class action suits in US courts. In future Iraq, Yemen, Morocco and other Arab states will face similar suits. Zionists were able to snag 80% of the 200,000 visas allotted to the Soviet Union during its demise even though most Soviet Jews were in no danger and had alternative places to go.

Drunk with power, it was a surprise to many Jews that Obama would implicate the Israeli occupation and settlements for the suffering of Palestinians. This does not comply with the image of Jews as the ultimate victims. Clearly, the Jewish holocaust resulted in the murder of far more of Jews than the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel. There is no comparison. The number of dead in a conflict is the easiest tool to categorize human suffering because numbers can be estimated after the destructions of war. But this is only one measure of suffering. In apartheid countries, such as in historical South Africa and the United States, the measure of suffering was not in numbers of dead but in the effect on a population subject to enslavement and denial of basic human rights for generations. This is not genocide in terms of lives lost, but it is a cultural genocide, an ethnic cleansing. Forcing generations of Africans and Palestinians to work as slave labor, denying generations of children education, stealing their resources, expulsions, incarceration of half the adult male population, results in a cultural genocide. In much of human history, death was preferable to enslavement. Virginia of 1775 went to war with a rallying cry “Give me Liberty or Give me Death”. Similarly 2000 years ago, Masada Jews reportedly preferred mass suicide to enslavement to Rome.

Genocide, real or cultural, also leaves an impact on the society conducting the crime. In Nazi Germany, the population was brainwashed in believing that the solution to Germany's ills was to get rid of minorities that hold it back. It is debated whether German society quietly and knowingly acquiesced to the genocide committed by their leaders. Were many Germans ignorant of, or opposed to Nazi philosophy or are they lying to hide their culpability? In practical terms, was Joseph Alios Ratzinger enthusiastic about his Nazi schooling and taunted the mentally ill, Jews and Slavs on his way home from his Hitler Youth meetings or should we believe the Pope when he said he had no stomach for it? The reality is that the Nazis were an efficient killing machine and they did not require the entire German population to participate in the mass murder of minorities. The killing fields were not placed in the center of German towns. Hitler and even Stalin took care to place their death camps in remote locations. The Nazis used propaganda to put hatred and fear into the hearts of the German population. Goebbels, the father of modern political advertising, reportedly said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. I believe that that many Germans can claim ignorance of the extent of the barbarism carried out by a small number of Nazis.

There was a different type of genocide in Rwanda and Palestine. Here, the genocide was not carried out in the model of Nazi efficiency. Mass murder in Rwanda was done largely one hack at a time with a machete. The murders conducted over a matter of a few months were a societal phenomenon. Similarly in Palestine, the minority Jews were in control of a larger indigenous population for up to 60 years. Jews had to occupy and cleanse the lands of the Negev, Galilee, and the West Bank from its inhabitants. Bit by bit the farms, waters and other resources had to be confiscated; buildings, culture and people had to be destroyed. Wars against the local inhabitants started before 1948 and continued to the slaughter in Gaza in 2009 and will continue as long as the US and the Neocons allow it. Every Jew in Israel was needed to occupy the land and control the daily lives of 6 million Palestinians and wage wars on neighbors. This experience of the average Israeli and Hutu was very different to the experience of the average German in WWII.

Germany, Japan and Rwanda, needed to re-educate and reconcile its populations. Israel never did. In fact, most Israelis take pride in subjudicating the Palestinian populations. The majority of western Jews also take pride in Israel's actions as self preservation and even holy. If Jews are to co-exist with western democracies, let alone with its Arab neighbors it has to atone for its cultural genocide. The alternative is that the western nations must modify their moral compass to tolerate Israel and its Neocon sympathizers. This Zionist minority within the US has already made inroads in modifying the nature of this nation. Neocons have started to dismantle the Constitution. The Zionist ideologues have implemented many Israeli laws and practices in this country such as permanent incarceration without a trial, trial without evidence, separation walls; extreme interrogation or torture, guilt by association, denial of individual and collective freedoms, and censorship of political opinions.

I cannot fault Friedman for saying that Arabs are reared on hatred of Israel. Friedman would also have been right to say that most Muslims are so taught. Palestine is the thorn in the Muslim's sides. But Friedman and other Zionists ascribe the "Mother's Milk" theory to Arabs as a baseless hatred, a disease, as anti-Semitism, forgetting that Muslims have no historic basis for enmity with the Jew prior to the creation of Israel. The historic anti-Semitism of the Church is not relevant to Muslims. Arabs have always been Muslims, Christians and Jews and they have usually coexisted. It was the failure of secular Arab politicians to find remedy to the question of Palestine that led to a fundamentalist form of Islam to spread globally. The transformation of Islam to violence should not be tolerated by the majority of peaceful Muslims. The radical sects are well funded and intimidate the moderates. Initially fundamentalism was spread by Saudi money using madrassas. But not all Madrassas teach fanatical Islam. Madrassah is Arabic for school.

Perpetuating the Mother’s Milk theory plays well for Zionists as it generates funds for its business machine and it absolves you of blame. For Zionists, anti-Semitism is the goose that lays the golden egg. It cannot be allowed to die. Every scribble on every high school bathroom wall is analyzed by the ADL for its mystic anti-Semitic content. Fears and fabrication of anti-Semitic resurgence are regularly broadcast across the western media.

Jews are surrounded by expressions of genocide. Not only form personal history and the Jewish media, factual and fictional, but the Hebrew Scriptures are full of it. God told Moses on the Plains of Moab at Jordan-Jericho: "Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it . "But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell." By comparison to God’s demands in Scripture, Israel’s modern occupation of the land of Canaan and the ethnic cleansing can be seen as a “benign occupation” and the Israeli army can truly be called the most “moral army in the world” for not obeying the words of the Lord. Lacking the capacity to empathize with their victims, modern Zionists borrow these less salubrious mores from the Bible and project them upon their Palestinian victims. Hence the Jewish media often quotes that it is the Arab who will push the Jews, and their nuclear weapons, into the sea.

For Muslims, Obama and his inner sanctum Zionists (Axelrod, Emmanuel, Clinton) have achieved only a small success in reversing the Bush 43 Zionificiation of US foreign policy so far. The failures of the Obama administration are numerous, such as its attempts to withdraw from Iraq, shut down Guantanamo, reverse the policies on spying on Muslim citizens, elimination of emergency laws, and the demand that Israel stop expanding illegal settlements on occupied Arab lands. They have succeeded only in slightly improving military tribunals for Guantanamo inmates who have been incarcerated for 7 years without a trial and who have not yet seen the charges against them. This small success is not extended to the 25000 inmates of Camp Bucca in Iraq. It is hardly surprising that the majority of the comments from the Muslim and Arab worlds to the Obama speech have been to the effect that nice words come cheap.

The anger Muslims and Arabs feel for Palestine is real and it cannot be quelled by Obama's half measures of justice. International law requires all 500000 Jewish settlers to be removed from occupied lands. Obama should have apologized for the continued absence of Palestine on the world map, due singlehandedly to US intransigence at the United Nations Security Council and blind Congressional support for Israel.

Obama should have apologized for the Israel-inspired US actions that have resulted in the death of millions of Muslims worldwide. Well before the attack on the US in 2001, the US Congress had outlawed Muslim charities, aspirations, and imprisoned educators and thinkers. Obama bragged there were 1200 mosques in the USA but failed to tell Muslims overseas that there was ten times that number of government agents spying, recording and setting up plots to entrap the worshipers inside. Obama should have told listeners that the US invented Abscam 28 years ago and waged war for Israel on more than one occasion and we are again being lobbied to start a war on Iran. Obama should have apologized for the deaths of so many Iraqi children during the 11 years of sanctions and for the continued existence of Guantanamo and Camp Bucca.

Obama was comfortable lecturing 1.5 billion Muslims. I felt like a wayward child being chided. I heard half truths. Obama did not explain his inability to overrule the pro-Israel lobby with its control of Congress. Most Muslims do not know these facts. It would have helped Muslims to cope with the coming failures of Obama to deliver anything to Arabs and Palestine.

The next day we saw Obama equally comfortable being lectured to by Ellie Wiesel on behalf of the world's 0.03 billion Jews. Had Obama been equally able to lecture Jews, he would have said that he would make it illegal to send taxpayer money to support the occupation of Palestine. The US would no longer allow future Bernie Madoffs to use tax deductions to benefit racist Jewish organizations. No US arms would ever kill innocent Lebanese and Palestinian villagers. That the US would spend as much time and money trying to prevent future holocausts as it does dwelling on past holocausts. Obama should have demanded Israel compensate Palestinians for loss of land and businesses equivalent to the compensation Jews received for giving up illegal homes in Gaza.Obama would have said it was not in the interest of the US support Israel blindly and to be enemies of the Muslim world. Obama might even have chided Zionists for pushing the Mothers Milk theory.

However, absent an independent political party in the US, Arabs and Muslims should consider what the US foreign policy might have been if McCain was in power. Muslims must partner with Obama to reverse the flow of fundamentalist, violent Islam not through war but through dialogue. Muslims must call on Obama’s Zionist staff to lead the fight to free Congress of its subservience to the Zionist lobby.

It is my fear that Obama the pragmatist will give up an evenhanded approach towards Islam and Palestine as long as Congress is controlled by the Zionist lobby. My lecture to Obama is to persevere and if necessary to do as President Bush 42 when he threatened to put a freeze on aid to Israel over settlement expansions and was willing to go directly to the American people with his cause. Americans are ready to support Obama on Palestinian statehood. Americans are tired of war and do not want to wage yet another war for Israel on Iran. If Obama does not change US policy, then Muslims must reasonably ally themselves with China and Russia and repeat the history of 1950s. But this time round, the US is not a thriving superpower and Muslim funds might tip the balance of power.