The Cairo Speech

I'm about half-way through listening to Obama's Cairo speech for the third time.

If you have not heard it yet, set aside an hour and watch it here. It could very well be yet another turning point in history. It is the most carefully constructed speech I have heard in my lifetime (and I've heard a lot of Obama speeches).

There have been criticisms of the speech. Some said Obama implied something called "a moral equivalency" between the Holocaust and the mistreatment of the Palestinians. People making this criticism weren't paying attention, or maybe hope you weren't.

Some said he should have said something nasty about the Mubarak government in Egypt, who provided him the Cairo venue for his speech. These people don't explain how being nasty to Mubarak would be helpful to the people of Egypt. An Egyptian TV journalist's reaction to the speech implicitly endorses Obama's approach:

... there were even greater emotions among Egyptians that went beyond "wow" and "pride." Maybe some of my more eloquent friends can give me a better word to describe the impact of the whole day. But let me try to describe the sense in the example of one very prominent TV journalist. She always plays her cards close to the chest and is a very tough interviewer with US officials. I usually consider her to be fair, but not "pro" U.S. Well, yesterday tears were streaming down her face. She was in a bit of panic, too, because she had to go live right after the speech and was frantically touching up her make up. Later I saw her and without me even asking what she thought, she started in. Her view was that never in her life had such a cross section of Egypt been together in one room. Egyptian government officials, opposition leaders, religious leaders, bloggers, journalists, activists, students, Muslim Brotherhood, the Israeli ambassador (he was invited with other regional ambassadors), intellectuals and artists. To her there was suddenly hope.

And inviting that cross-section was at Obama's insistence.

Finally, for comic relief, there were those who said the speech was "un-American". Like that icon of the Modern Republican Party, Oklahoma's senior Senator, Jim Inhofe.

So, by all means, listen to the speech, and note down all the nasty things he says about America.