Obama's Eight Commandments

Barack Obama may or may not be divinely inspired, but he can certainly deliver a soul-stirring sermon. Not that I’m suggesting that he imagines himself to be some kind of messiah.

But as far as I’m concerned he’s the best candidate among current world leaders to fix some of the messes mankind finds itself in.

Mind you, almost any US president would look good after two terms of the nit-witted George Bush and his neoconservative nasties. So it’s hardly any wonder that Obama is seen by many as some kind of saviour. And he will be, at least to some extent, if he keeps on practising what he preaches.

He has already ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and banned torture by US forces and agencies. And now, with last week’s speech at Cairo University, he has put the governments of Islamic nations on notice to get their act together.

Yes, I’m aware that he couched his message in kind and conciliatory terms, conceding past injustices, acknowledging the contributions of Islamic societies to world culture and quoting the Holy Quran.

He started with the line ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth’. This may have sounded like motherhood to some listeners. But Obama is no idiot, and nor is he ignorant of the fact that this line stands as a severe criticism of, and fundamental challenge to, every Muslim-majority nation on earth.

Nowhere in the Muslim world that I can think of, from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, Morocco to Malaysia, do governments speak the truth or permit their nation’s media to speak the truth to their people.

So this seems to me what, for all the honeyed phrases and resonant rhetoric in which they were couched, was Obama’s First Commandment, and thus bears repeating:

1. Be conscious of God and always speak the truth.

Then followed the seven other commandments of the Obama doctrine. None of them carved on tablets of stone, admittedly, but nevertheless backed by a rock-hard resolve to encourage compliance or, if necessary, resort to outright enforcement:

2. Abandon and fight violent extremism.

3. Recognise and respect Israel.

4. Don’t build nuclear weapons.

5. Govern in the interests of the people.

6. Practise freedom of religion.

7. Grant women full equality.

8. Embrace education and innovation.

Warning to governments

Strangely, many of the people I heard comment on the speech in which Obama handed down these Eight Commandments seemed to imagine that he was somehow accommodating to the Muslim world.

To me it was nothing of the sort. It was a warning to governments and other self-appointed groups that use the great Islamic faith to justify repressing, robbing and killing their citizens and neighbours, Muslim or otherwise, that Obama’s US won’t tolerate evil hypocritically committed in the name of Allah.

And it was a call to honest, peace-loving, God-fearing Muslims everywhere to oppose rulers and other would-be ‘representatives’ who pervert the Islamic faith and use it as a pretext on which to justify their pursuit of power and plunder.

Obama is aware, as everyone else is, that there are governments and groups falsely claiming to be ‘godly’ - Iran, Syria, Sudan, al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah are just a few that spring immediately to mind - and that they offend all eight of the Obama Commandments as well as every principle of Islam.

Even the Barisan Nasional (BN) government of Malaysia, which many see as a relatively moderate Muslim-majority nation, is in flagrant breach of Obama Commandments 1, 3, 5 and 6, and makes a decidedly mediocre showing on numbers 7 and 8.

In contravention of the First of these Commandments is the BN government’s suppression of the media through the Official Secrets Act, the Printing Presses and Publications Act or the threat of detention without trial under the Internal Security Act.

Then, in flagrant defiance of the Third Obama Commandment, Malaysia, like Iran, refuses to recognise the existence of Israel, yet alone its right to endure.

As for Obama’s Fifth Commandment, the BN government piously claims that it is not only democratically elected, but that it rules with the consent and in the interests of the people. But in fact Malaysia’s Election Commission, judiciary and other civil institutions are so BN-biased, and the whole system so riddled with nepotism, corruption and official secrecy that the interests of the people are clearly by no means uppermost in the government’s mind.

An all-too-predictable situation, let’s face it, for many - far too many - nations, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. But the way the Malaysian government sins against the Sixth Obama Commandment may well be utterly unique, in that it freely permits non-Muslims to worship or not and to change their religions if and when they wish, but denies the same freedom to the majority Malays.

While Arabs, for example, don’t all have to be Muslims, all Malaysian Malays are both by definition born into Islam, and forbidden from ever leaving.

Lest we fixate too much on Malaysia in particular or the Muslim world in general, let me make the point that I imagine Obama intended his Cairo Commandments to apply to every country, Islamic or otherwise.

For all that he’s a Christian with some Muslim forbears, the principles he propounds are humanist rather than religious, and so they can apply equally across the political and sectarian spectrum.

So whether you believe that God is good, or as I do that good is God, it’s great to have Obama’s Commandments on our side in the fight to force ruling regimes to start telling us citizens the gospel truth and governing as fairly, justly and honestly as we have a sacred right to expect.