Barack Obama at the United Nations: Universal Declaration of Jerks’ Rights
Barack Obama at the United Nations: Universal Declaration of Jerks’ Rights
BARACK OBAMA gave a pretty clear defence of the universal human right to be an obnoxious, blasphemy-spewing jerk at the United Nations today. One of the interesting parts of watching the speech (video here, full text here), for me, was trying to figure out which audiences different parts of the speech were addressed to, or how the same sections might play to different audiences. On the one hand, you had the actual people physically present in the hall, who are probably the oddest, toughest, and at the same time probably the least significant audience for the speech. These are, after all, diplomats; they aren’t really supposed to have opinions or sentiments that can be moved by an address. Gatherings of international diplomats and functionaries like the UN General Assembly are by their nature very strange crowds, highly conservative, and in general only responsive to organisationally approved platitudes which they know they can applaud because they’ve already been voted for repeatedly in universal declarations or in a goals document named for a summit in some equatorial capital two decades ago.
I thought I detected a nod to this crowd when Mr Obama quoted Mahatma Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” The correct move here was to couch the American defence of the right to blasphemy in the words of a hero of the non-aligned movement whom even the Egyptians might have to applaud, lest they piss off the Indians. Nobody can be against Gandhi! So it’s a safe applause line, for anybody except a funky postmodern anti-anti-colonialist like Dinesh D’Souza; but I doubt he was in the audience. And I thought something similar was going on with this sequence:
The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt - it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women - it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.
It’s not always a safe applause line to bring up girls’ educational rights as part of a discussion of religious tolerance and civil rights in the Muslim world. Except, that is, at the United Nations, where every country present has explicitly ratified girls’ educational rights in various universal declarations and the goals documents named for the summits in the equatorial capitals, which they signed in part because they didn’t think they’d actually mean anything. It is the humanitarian politician’s beautiful art to exploit such settings and carelessly made promises in order to needle these countries a few centimetres closer to actually educating their girls.