A worshipful media, or at least large segments of it, have been cooing over the Obama trip to the Middle East in general and his "historic" Cairo speech in particular. Not all journalists, however, are bending the knee. Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has an excellent analysis of what the President said and some fascinating thoughts on what she fears his intentions are vis a vis Israel and Iran.
Ms Glick sounds a little bit too angry in the column for my taste, but then, if she's correct, perhaps she has reason to be. Here's an excerpt from her essay:
[President Obama] spoke of the need to grant equality to women without making mention of common Islamic practices like so-called honor killings, and female genital mutilation. He ignored the fact that throughout the lands of Islam women are denied basic legal and human rights. And then he qualified his statement by mendaciously claiming that women in the US similarly suffer from an equality deficit. In so discussing this issue, Obama sent the message that he couldn't care less about the plight of women in the Islamic world.
So, too, Obama spoke about the need for religious freedom but ignored Saudi Arabian religious apartheid. He talked about the blessings of democracy but ignored the problems of tyranny.
In short, Obama's "straight talk" to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.
In a like manner, Obama's tough "truths" about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.
On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America's ties to Israel are "unbreakable."
Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign - and therefore unjustifiable - intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.
The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to soothe the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.
This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the "reconstitution" - not the creation - of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.
But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history."
He then explicitly tied Israel's establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.
Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel's rebirth, was Obama's characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners' treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, "resistance."
Be sure to read the rest. It's very insightful.
My biggest problem with the President's approach to the Arab world is that he seems to be all too eager to apologize for America's conduct vis a vis Muslims when in fact the United States has been the best friend Muslims have ever had.
It's only America's restraining hand on Israel's shoulder that has kept Israel from utterly destroying its Muslim enemies in Gaza and Lebanon. In the early 90s we rescued Kuwait from the rape and pillage of Sadaam Hussein's troops and intervened to save Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia from what would have surely been a genocidal holocaust. In the current decade we sent hundreds of millions of dollars to help Muslims devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. We've spent millions more to bring relief to African Muslims suffering the ravages of incompetent and corrupt government. More recently we liberated 50 million Muslims from oppression and tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq.
All of this has cost Americans in blood and treasure. No nation in the world, certainly no Muslim nation, has done as much for other Muslims as has the United States and yet President Obama mentions none of this. Like most on the left, Mr. Obama can see only American missteps and faults and seems blind to the many facts which contradict his worldview. No wonder Glick sounds angry.
RLC