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Obama’s Cairo speech: Time for some people to move on
By John Bourke
Pravda
Today saw US President Barack Obama make his historic keynote speech to the Muslim world in Cairo .
It covered seven key policy areas affecting the Arab world - violent
extremism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development and opportunity
It was both comprehensive and detailed, whether you agree with it’s
viewpoints or not, and will probably be considered reasonably even-handed generally by most mainstream pundits.
It criticized those on both sides of the issues – even making admission of his own country’s errors of
judgment at times – and asked people to now leave the past in the past and make the effort to work together for a better future.
What could possibly be bad about that you might think and yet within minutes we were
already seeing the critics line up to explain to anyone who will listen what was wrong with it.
And whilst a critique and hearing the other side of the story is always valuable, what seems most striking is the stale and
jaded tone to much of the frankly just downright unpleasant rhetoric that is being thrown at a man who, no matter what you may think, is at the very least if nothing else trying to make an effort to repair things, listen to
others and move forward to better times.
Much of the criticism seems to fall into two main categories, the first of these evidently coming as it so often does from those who simply do not like him and will forever find
fault with just about anything that he does no matter what.
Key amongst these will be those on the right who are criticizing him for the unnecessary level of apology that they feel he keeps making for America ’s role in
the world.
What is behind this take on things, however, is the deep rooted belief that America simply has done no wrong at all under the last eight years of the previous Bush administration, a perception on things that
increasingly only a dwindling number of die-hard conservatives still cling to anyway.
Many of this same group simply do not accept some of the most basics concepts out there in the first place.
Many of them do not
agree at all with the view the Muslim religion is one of tolerance. Nor do they accept the notion of a world free of nuclear arms because they believe that they, as the sole remaining super power, should be the only one to have
them anyway.
The point then, quite simply, is that for those who think like this - they were never going to find anything agreeable about this speech before it even happened anyway.
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