Posted on 06/06/2009 5:50:13 AM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
With his speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University on Thursday, Barack Obama put a new face on American foreign policy, or at least a face that the world has not seen since the 1970s. This is America’s penitent, humbled and even sycophantic face.
President Obama seeks a “new beginning” to US-Muslim relations through frank self-examination and mutual respect. The US is locked in a battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims, whether it likes it or not. Self-examination can be a sign of strength. But we should not delude ourselves that the Muslim world sees it as such. The Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks for many when he says that it is “the power of Muslims which [has] made the new US administration try to portray a new image”. And there is another problem: the politics of national self-abasement, from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev, is not popular with voters. It cannot be practised for long because it entails a huge – usually fatal – drawing down of political capital.
...
But the key point of the speech was to downgrade the US alliance with Israel, to shift US support from the Israeli position to the Muslim one. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements [in the West Bank],” Mr Obama said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Instead of a new beginning I would like to see a new ending.
0bama needs to apologize for his own birth (wherever that may have been) and for his lack of transparency about it.
0 is giving them a Carter flashback moment.
“0bama needs to apologize for his own birth (wherever that may have been) and for his lack of transparency about it.”
Is BHO ever going to apologize that his mother didn’t have him terminated in a late-term abortion? That would be a statement that should make both his supporters and critics happy.
Don’t apologize in my name!
You don’t speak for me!
I don't know about that. People here seem to be eating it up.
Excellent post and the entire article is a valuable read . This type of analysis is not available in our state controlled media.
One might think so when coverage is filtered through the state controlled media.
That’s my thinking, but I wasn’t going to go there in print. LOL
WTF? I haven't seen or heard of any of that.
H! belongs in a burka.
In part it was the president’s oratorical tics: the greeting of assalum alaykum; describing the Middle East as the region in which Islam was first “revealed” (a formulation usually used by believers
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