Now it can be told: Obama has Muslim roots

Political expedience is not the determination of truth. Historical record and logic are more accurate determining features.

There are lots of interesting features on what this speech will mean. As per Israel, check out “inconvenient truth” link at Instapundit to The Spine by Marty Peretz @ The New Republic.

What dismays me most about Barack Obama’s Middle East initiative is that the only country in the area he seems to be pressing is Israel. He is not pressing Egypt and perhaps that’s because there is nothing that Cairo can give.

[And on the Palestinian issue] Bordering on despair, the Post’s Jim Hoagland has also written about this curious positioning of the new crowd. Hoagland really knows about this decades old conflict in a way that, believe me, George Mitchell couldn’t begin to match as long as he lives. Here’s an essential excerpt from Hoagland’s “Memo to President Obama.”

Cling to one thought as you work on your greatly anticipated speech to the Muslim world Thursday in Cairo, Mr. President.
There is no American solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that you can heroically deliver from on high. Peace must be built
from the bottom by both sides…

It would be pleasing to your hosts to suggest the opposite –a made-in-the-USA plan for the Middle East. Some of your aides
believe this is a special moment that can end the region’s Sixty Years War if you intervene forcefully enough. But that neglects
history and the internal logic of the conflict.

This is true wisdom. But it won’t get anyone applause.

Obama’s delivering his Muslim address this time in Egypt.

Obama and the Freedom Agenda

One of those persecuted Egyptian liberals, Ayman Nour, recently asked whether Mr. Obama will “confirm his commitment to democracy, or will he appease dictators and aggressors?” One single speech cannot definitively answer that question but hopefully, tomorrow in Cairo, Ayman Nour will be pleased with Barack Obama’s words.

Paul Wolfowitz, WSJ

Yeah, Wolfowitz with all his warts.

But from Michael Crowley’s interviews we know that Ayman Nour will not attend the speech, declining Obama’s offer that seems to him a ploy to make Nour just another in Obama’s bag of marbles.

Habib explained his skepticism about Obama’s speech here on Thursday. “If there is no radical change in American policies, I don’t think it matters what he says,” Habib told me through a translator. “I pity Obama because I know he is not on his own. He is surrounded by different forces–business congolmerates and the Zionist lobby.” Nor did Habib care much for the prevailing debate in the US about how much emphasis to place on democracy promotion. “Understand that democracy in the Bush administration was not a goal itself but a curtain to hide the atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.” When it comes to Egypt’s internal affairs, all the Muslim Brothers ask, Habib said, was that the US end its support for Hosni Mubarak’s regime. “We don’t want anything from the U.S. but to back off from supporting existing dictatorships. That’s it,” he said.

Oddly, it is not Islamists like Habib who are most upset with Obama right now. It is sectarian reformers like Ayman Nour, a 2005 presidential candidate who was imprisoned in 2006 and unexpectedly released earlier this year. I also met today with Nour, who told me that he, too, had been invited to Obama’s speech–although he says he won’t go and doesn’t expect to applaud it. Tomorrow, I’ll write more about Nour, perhaps the one Egyptian opposition figure Obama can get behind.

Obama has his cheering squad stateside. We’ll see about the score from the internet when all is said and done.

maverick muse on June 3, 2009 at 7:05 AM