Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Those people who feel there is something “wrong” with President Barack Obama’s politics can’t quite put their finger on it. So they call him a “socialist” or even “Communist,” and, like former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani, maintain that he doesn’t “love America.”
But since they probably haven’t been university students recently, they aren’t familiar with Obama’s real ideology – “post-colonialism,” as fathered by the late Palestinian-American Columbia University professor Edward Said.
Most of today’s “political correctness” has emerged from this brew of Marxism and what we might refer to as “Third World liberationism.” And in terms of foreign policy, it is directed at western regimes – and in particular, to the “settler state” of Israel. On the other hand, brutal regimes such as the one in Iran are still seen as “victims.”
By the time Obama got to college, after spending most of his youth in Hawaii and Indonesia (which is what Guiliani meant by saying Obama was not brought up like most Americans), this dogma had replaced the New Left activism of the 1960s espoused by people like Obama’s own mother.
Since the November 2014 midterm Congressional elections, Obama has become more open in his espousal of this world-view – after all, he no longer has to face an electorate, nor does his party, until 2016 -- and it became more clear that he was a disciple of Said’s.
I was just referring to ideological affinity. But then I did a simple Google search, entering the words Barack Obama and Edward Said, and – lo and behold – it turns out there was an actual personal connection.
It appears that Obama, as a student at Columbia University in New York in 1982, took courses with the leading theoretician of post-colonialism, the academic who authored Culture and Imperialism, The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession, and his 1978 masterwork, Orientalism. That last book, in particular, has shaped how the world is viewed by a generation of academics, journalists, and other intellectuals.
In Culture and Imperialism, Said wrote that “The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force.” For Obama, the idea of “American exceptionalism” has been a ruse designed to mask America’s position as the inheritor of European colonialism.
Obama and Said kept in touch after Obama moved to Chicago, where the future president would become a community organizer. The Obamas attended a Palestinian fundraiser in Chicago in May 1998 at which Said was the featured speaker.
Obama also befriended Said’s protegé Rashid Khalidi, who was at the time a professor at the University of Chicago. Khalidi moved to Columbia in 2003, where he currently occupies the Edward Said chair of Modern Arab Studies. The Obamas attended his farewell party.
A special tribute at the party came from “Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama,” reported an April 10, 2008 Los Angeles Times article. “Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.”
The consequences for American policy in the Middle East have been profound, including the current “cold war” between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice blasted Netanyahu’s March 3 address to Congress, in which he warned that the future of Israel, and the world, is imperiled by a pending “bad deal” with Iran on its nuclear program.
Rice called his visit “destructive” to relations between the U.S. and Israel. Such invective is almost unheard of when speaking about an ally.
Obama’s politics also harkens back to an older American tradition, that of the influential Communist-organized Popular Front of the 1930s. As University of Connecticut Professor Christopher Vials observes in his recent book Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States, “Popular Front nationalism was of an aspirational sort.”
Rather than applauding the United States for “offering the best system in the world, it praised the nation mainly for the promise it held for the future.”
Obama loves today’s America less than he does the future one he is helping to create, where subaltern groups who are socially, politically, and geographically outside of the power structure -- African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims -- would gain their place in an America that will have finally transcended its white, largely Protestant ideological past: Hence his fervent pro-immigration stance.
Edward Said did his work well. Who says academics have no influence!
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