David Albuquerque (QLD) writes to US President Obama about his pledges 4Nov09 November 4, 2009
Whatever happened to your pledge at your inauguration: “Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations?”
Mr President, I regret to say you have faltered. In June, in a speech in Cairo addressing the Muslim world, you called for an immediate end to Israeli settlement construction: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
Three months after that statement, you back-tracked from that position when your special envoy, Mr George Mitchell, said: “But we do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them.”
Statements made today and retracted tomorrow cast a shadow over the hope that change has come to America. For example, on Tuesday, May 19, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on al-Jazeera: “We want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth — any kind of settlement activity. That is what the President has called for.”
Five months after making that statement, the Secretary of State, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, praised Israel’s policy of aiming to resume peace talks while continuing settlement construction:“What the Prime Minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements which he has just described – no new starts for example, is unprecedented in the context of prior-to negotiations.”
Year after year, decade after decade, American officials keep repeating U.S. opposition to the settlements — and Israeli governments keep on building them. More than 120 settlements have been constructed over the past 42 years, and the Israeli population in the West Bank now totals 190,000 in the Jerusalem area and 289,000 elsewhere.
For years, the official U.S. position was that the settlements were illegal under international law because they violated the Fourth Geneva Convention on protection of civilians in time of war. That document, adopted in 1949, specifies: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The application of this article to Israel was endorsed by the administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Even President George W. Bush, on April 4, 2002, had the courage to say “Israeli settlement activity in occupied territories must stop, and the occupation must end through withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries, consistent with United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338.”
On the anniversary of the Normandy landings you said these words: “And so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free.” Can the President deliver on his inaugural pledge not to falter in delivering freedom to future generations of all races? The answer, in your own words, is: Yes we can!
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