About The Browntable
2009
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EmailPresident Barack Obama's major speech in Cairo, Egypt lived up to the hype; not that, as the president said at the city's Al-Azhar University, "a single speech can eradicate years of mistrust," but that Obama is uniquely comfortable speaking plainly in the most uncomfortable of situations. And here—in a Muslim country not yet fully democratic, before an audience of skeptical, but cosmopolitan Egyptians and a noisome public at home—was an uncomfortable situation. Yet the 50-minute speech delivered on a campaign pledge to reach out to the Muslim world. Watch:
And, unlike the campaign, during which Obama showed repeated insensitivity toward Muslim-Americans, the president didn't shrink from the instinctive discomfort and the threat of domestic political backlash. Rather, he freely quoted the Islamic Qu'ran throughout his speech, using suras promoting peace and nonviolence, and citing at one point "the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer."
Obama's reverence for Muhammed got a huge round of applause from the packed hall—though perhaps not as loud as his assertion that he's closing the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, the earliest reactions suggest that results, rather than warm rhetoric, will keep better and thus travel farther than the audience of Arab elites in Cairo.
Nevertheless, the president trotted out the best of America's history with Islam, including Thomas Jefferson's personal Qu'ran, and John Adams' writing that "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." Obama himself pledged "to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear," and insisted that America "cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism." Above all, the stylistic message he sought to impart was apiece with Colin Powell's stirring call for greater religious tolerance: "Islam is part of America."
From a policy perspective, Obama again took guidance from the Islamic holy text: “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” The meat of his speech addressed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, religious freedom, women's rights, and the unending conflict in the West Bank. The president did not break any new policy ground, particularly on Israeli-Arab peace, but was surprisingly blunt about US unpopularity, and the culture of avoidance and blame that persists in the Middle East, and impedes regional peace. And the optics of him speaking honestly and with reason to an assembly of Egyptians (just as America has grown accustomed to) were remarkable.
The effect of the president's liberal borrowing from Islamic, Christian and Jewish histories and rhetoric was a clever hodgepodge of influences that in the end seemed quintessentially American. Indeed, Obama made an explicit comparison between the patient suffrage and resistance of black Americans and what is needed in Palestinian territories:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and 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. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
What do you make of the comparison? And of the speech in general?
—DAYO OLOPADE
(Home Page photo, via Getty Images: Iraqi men in Bahdad watch a live broadcast on satellite television of a speech delivered in Cairo by US President Barack Obama on June 4, 2009.)
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With diverse Muslim converts as world leaders, United Nations representatives, world trade officials, global bankers and even ethnically diverse taxpaying voters here in America, the President's words were relevant in the Middle East, globally, and across urban and suburban America. He also effectively checkmated the minority of Islamic extremists and zealots who will increasingly have their bankrupt rhetoric exposed and recruitment hype deflated.
The U.S. policy regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict will begin to shift to a much more balanced political and military strategy that's more rooted in America's own broader current and longterm international interests. While Israel will and must remain a key ally, it will no longer be America's only senior partner in an expanding and more complex U.S. Middle East and global policy mission — though the alliances will sometimes become challenging and contentious.
In the final analysis, it is our own best political, economic and diplomatic interests that are key to sustaining America's geopolitical prowess, prosperity, success and safety.
Under the radar of most U.S. news media and partisan pundits, Obama is restructuring a global framework that is setting the United States on a new globally aware and agile path. This track, barring any major political or economic barriers, will grow American global empowerment in dimensions not foreseen or considered by some of today's major players (i.e. China, Russia, European Union, and India). This president is thinking beyond the next election or news cycles.
Dennis Moore, Publisher --- ppceo@POTUSWorld.com
http://www.POTUSWorld.com/Page_Two.html#Obama_Speaks_To_Muslims
I think it's lost on many that this speech was not aimed at the extremists, but toward the everyday men and women of the Muslim world. Nor was it meant to be a specific plan outlining the Presidents plans. It was meant to be a hand, held out in peace, that says to the Muslim world, we do not hate you; we respect you. We do not wish to fight; we wish for peace. Obama knows, as do we from our own experience, that our conflicts have taken their toll, and he's appealing to their humanity by admitting ours.
As "extremists", Osama bin Laden and Rush Limbaugh share more in common than either would admit including the fact that President Obama is the singular worse nightmare of both.
He is strategically marginalizing both of them in his words and actions which both in turn themselves further compound with their own words and actions in response.
The point will soon be reach when both are publicly recognized by Muslims and Americans alike as irrelevant in their wannabe impact.
RE: He is not what we are used [to] (thank God for that). Never at any point did he offer specifics.
If ever there was a non-sequitur, that comment is one--what indeed we have been used to is talk, talk, and more talk without concrete specifics. But hey, if grandiose rhetoric carries the day--and changes world opinion--so be it. Our reputation abroad could use an extreme makeover.
All things considered, President Obama's speech at Cairo University may go down as one of America's most far reaching ans significant foreign policy addresses by an American president. As Islam is statistically one of the fastest growing religions in the world, and increasingly in Black America, the President most likely has a more strategic and calculated purpose.
With diverse Muslim converts as world leaders, United Nations representatives, world trade officials, global bankers and even racially diverse taxpaying voters here in America, the President's words were relevant in the Middle East, globally, and throughout urban and suburban America. He also effectively checkmated the minority of Islamic extremists who will increasingly have their bankrupt rhetoric exposed and recruitment hype deflated.
The U.S. policy regarding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict will begin to shift to a more balanced political and military strategy that's more rooted in America's broader current and longterm international interests. While Israel will and must remain a key ally, it will no longer be America's only senior partner in an expanding and more complex U.S. Middle East and global policy mission.
Under the radar of most U.S. news media and partisan pundits, Obama is restructuring a global framework that is setting the United States in a new globally aware and agile position. This track, barring any major political or economic barriers, will grow American global empowerment in dimensions not foreseen or considered by some of today's major players (i.e. China, Russia, European Union, and India). The myopic and moronic reportage presented by most network and cable TV news media only scratches the thinnest first layer of Obama foreign policies that are steadily transforming 21st century global politics. It is no coincidence that the President has made overseas travel and talks, along with the U.S. economy, a high priority initiative in his first year of office.
As politics is still local, the President seems to have struck a strategic nexus by reaching out to a global religion from the location of its origins and greatest influence.
Dennis Moore, Publisher --- http://www.POTUSWorld.com
ppceo@POTUSWorld.com
I think people have not yet become accustomed to President Obama's style. He is not what we are used (thank God for that). Never at any point did he offer specifics. He opened by stating that he is looking for a new beginning - a turning point so to speak. Peace in the Middle East has failed so far because we arrogantly want to come up with specifics to people of a very different culture and way of life. What the President did today was both exactly what the "doctor ordered" - the Muslim world does not need us to prescribe for them a way forward but need to hear from us that we respect their choices as long as those choices include basic human rights, education for all, equality of women etc.
Brilliant is all I can say - truly proud of my President.
To John Connor - the speech was not directed to the "2 day news cycle" nor was it was the Democrats but for the Muslim world - to their women and children who are being encourage to strive for a peaceful tomorrow. We are all tired of the aggression and the wars that come with