janiebelle
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Joined: 4/29/2009
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Caliph Obama definitely caused a few jaw drops around the world.
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President Obama opened the speech with 'Salaam Aleikum,' Arabic for “Peace unto you,” and reminded his listeners of his Muslim background. He quoted the Koran several times in his Cairo speech, stating that the Muslim holy book states, “Be conscious of G-d and speak always the truth."
The focus of his speech was a list of six sources of conflict that he said must be confronted in order to reach peace: Extremism, the Palestinian Authority-Israel dispute, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious tolerance, women’s rights, and economic growth and development.
After saying that a “single speech” cannot “erase years of distrust,” he praised Islam as a force of religious tolerance and racial equality. He stated that “Muslims have enriched the U.S. and have won Nobel prizes,” although in fact less than handful of Muslims have won international Nobel prizes.
The Muslim world’s expectations of the historic speech varied from great hope to deep skepticism among leaders and spokespersons for the 1.4-billion-strong Muslim world. The build-up to the speech was so intense that a wide range of commentators have stated the creation of “Great Expectations” would boomerang.
"You have never seen a president who has raised expectations so high in the Arab and Muslim world, for the good," Ibrahim Kalin, a scholar in Ankara, Turkey, and an adviser to the Turkish prime minister told the Washington Post. "People see in him something they would like to see in their own leaders, and that, in itself, creates huge expectations."
The Arab News website of Saudi Arabia, in an editorial welcoming President Obama’s arrival on Wednesday, wrote that “for too long the Arab world has been waiting in vain for a U.S. administration that will address the rights of the Palestinians within a viable sovereign state of their own."
“The American president has to cut through much lumber left by his predecessors. At the heart of it lies a legacy of often-deep distrust that has built up in the Arab world.”
Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), often accused of supporting Hamas, advised that President Obama must back up positive statements “with concrete policy initiatives.”
The Asia Times went so far as to say that the American president made a mistake by speaking in Cairo. “Why should the president of the United States address the ‘Muslim world?” it asked. “What would happen if the leader of a big country addressed the ‘Christian world’? Half the world would giggle and the other half would sulk."
“To speak to the ‘Muslim world’ is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration," the paper stated, "and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness.”
[link to www.israelnationalnews.com]
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Obama's Mideast Visit - 
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