Say what?

The White House - Press Office - Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09: "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding."
---------------
On the whole I thought President Obama's speech in Cairo was very good. But what he said about violence and resistance was quite a reinterpretation of US history. For example, there was that little matter of the Civil War, in which the death total was between 600,000 and 700,000. If not for the Civil War, slavery would have lasted in the South until slave rebellions ended it. And anybody who thinks the goals of the civil rights movement were not advanced by urban riots and by the militancy of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others profoundly misreads the history of the 1960s.

Moving beyond civil rights, how could anybody claim that resistance through violence doesn't succeed? What about the American revolution, or the Irish war for independence, or any number of other revolutions that led to the establishment of existing nations?

President Obama knows all this. He was addressing himself to the Palestinian intifada. If he had said that slaughtering innocent civilians by strapping bombs to children is wrong and does not succeed, I could understand it. If he had said that the Palestinians can't be a nation until they stop acting like this, even better. But he didn't want to criticize the Palestinians for their particularly senseless and depraved approach to "resistance" against Israel, so he just avoided making that distinction.