After listening to the president’s speech in Egypt this morning, National Review Online asked: Did the president do any good? Did he do harm?


JEFFREY AZARVA
President Obama’s address in Cairo today was a mixed bag. While not exactly the mea culpa that many detractors of his administration feared, the president’s speech failed to press the leadership of “the Muslim world” to self-reflect where it mattered most: democratic governance. Obama enumerated the merits of political pluralism and affirmed America’s respect for “the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world,” but he all but declared that there would be no practical consequences should the region’s potentates fail to “unclench their fist.”

I do applaud Obama for urging them to stop exploiting the Arab-Israeli conflict as a tool to distract from their failings at home, but he squandered a golden opportunity to reaffirm the major lesson of 9/11: that our past sponsorship of venal, autocratic regimes did nothing to neutralize violent extremism, but rather everything to incubate it. True, Obama pledged to support the rule of law and free speech around the world. But as those reformers in the region hanging on every word of his speech today would no doubt agree, a sterling defense of democracy it was not.

— Jeffrey Azarva is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.


ANGELO M. CODEVILLA
Just imagine: After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization have trod opposite paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward relations between the sexes and the role of work in life — and after a half-century during which Muslims have murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians, to the cheers of millions of their own — suddenly a young American seems to believe he can conjure up a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” How could anyone imagine he possesses such a “reset button”? The answer only starts with Yuppie hubris.

It is all too clear that Obama and his followers share one of the postmodern world’s most dangerous intellectual habits, indeed a habit that mainstream Islamic civilization adopted circa 1000 AD and that has so lowered its quality of life, namely disregard for the relationship between ends and means, cause and effect. Hence Obama told the Muslim world, “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” Must? Who will make it stop? How? He went on to say, “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace,” True enough. But at the same time he preached those differences, especially regarding women. In his piece de resistence he urged his audience to “abandon violence,” because “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.” But his audience knew perfectly well that the U.S. government had given billions of dollars to to the Muslim world precisely because so many Muslims had succeeded in killing so many Americans. Of course they had succeeded.

Americans have only begun to suffer for having empowered a leadership class so intellectually crippled.

— Angelo M. Codevilla is a visiting professor of politics and a Madison fellow at Princeton University.


DAVID GELERNTER
There was nothing wrong with this speech in principle. The boy who makes good returns home to bask in adulation. The young man whose father was a Muslim, schooled in Indonesia, middle name Hussein, becomes president — and naturally goes to Egypt to collect some homage. That’s only human, and if it can do America some good, so much the better.

The president said, “No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust”; in reality, no single speech can do much of anything, which is lucky for us.

The Cairo speech was a sustained act of dancing around the truth, feeding the crowd an occasional bitter-tasting fact followed by a ton of sugary nonsense; treating the most important truths as if they did not exist.

It’s easy to denounce the murder of 3,000 innocents on 9/11 — which the president did. It’s much harder to condemn the Arab crowds who danced in the streets afterward — which the president did not do. It’s easy to decry the long years of “tension” between the Muslim world and the U.S., but much harder to discuss the liaisons between Arab leaders and Nazi Germany, followed by the era of Soviet client states armed to the teeth and dedicated to the mass murder of Israelis. It’s easy to denounce President Bush’s America, but much harder to give it due credit and to uphold the honor of the United States and not just the honor of Barack Obama. “I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein,” said the president. Ultimately? And is this a belief, or is it a fact?

And the president somehow neglected to mention that the U.S. has done no harm whatsoever to “Muslims around the world,” that it has fought a series of wars in the Balkans and the Middle East on behalf of Muslim nations and peoples, or that a Muslim in the United States is vastly freer in every way than a Muslim in Cairo or in any other Middle Eastern nation, except for the new Iraq and, of course, Israel.

The Muslim world has suffered deeply from sustained lying by its educators, religious leaders, political rulers, and cultural elites. The president could have denounced these people and their load of hateful lies. But that would have required conviction and courage. And conviction and courage are above this president’s pay grade.

— David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale and a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard.


RAYMOND IBRAHIM
Though he early indicated that this would be an honest, heart-to-heart talk — “we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors” and “let me speak as clearly and plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together” — Obama did not follow through.

Obama followed every mild admonishment directed at the Islamic world immediately with several admissions of American mistakes, including reactions to 9/11, which “was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals.”

This double-standard is typified by the way he barely touched on the topic of Muslim persecution of religious minorities, while repeatedly gushing over how he’s helping American Muslims fulfill their zakat obligation and Muslim women wear the hijab vis-à-vis a non-friendly American system.

All fine platitudes, and (by now hackneyed) talk of “hope” and “change” — but will any of it be effective? Probably not, definitely not in the long term, where Obama — and the silly notion he embodies that all conflict is a product of “misunderstandings” and the need for “mutual respect” — is but a dot in that long continuum of stark history, one that he neither addressed nor understands.

— Raymond Ibrahim is editor of The Al Qaeda Reader.


MANSOOR IJAZ
The architecture of President Obama’s speech was brilliant — it certainly addressed the most burning issues facing Muslims around the world today.

Atmospherically, he hit it just right. His recitations from the Koran, his greeting to the gathering in Arabic, and even the respect he showed by saying “Muhammad, peace be upon him” when referring to Islam’s Holy Prophet, all demonstrated an abiding respect for Islamic traditions.

Thematically, the speech contained important ideas that, with the power of the U.S. presidency behind them, could just take root enough to matter. He offered to help Muslim communities around the world raise up and empower their women and educate their children in very concrete terms. He sought to equalize the playing field for minorities in Islamic countries whose persecution at the hands of extremists is one of the greater blights on its record as a great religion. And he planned to do all of this from an America that does not dictate any longer its brand of democracy but rather seeks to support governments that reflect the will of their people — governance born through the power of consent.

Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that?

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize the West and to try and bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.

— Mansoor Ijaz, a New York financier of Pakistani ancestry, jointly authored a ceasefire plan between Muslim militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir in 2000. He is an NRO contributor.


HERBERT LONDON
In his speech in Egypt President Obama has displayed yet again his view of American foreign policy. At its core, this position is one of transnational progressivism, a belief that the United States should adhere to international codes and agreements even if, in the process, national sovereignty is diminished.

As he sees it, the United States must withdraw from many foreign security obligations, a point that undergirds his Egyptian speech. What he does not seem to understand is that feints in this direction lead to treaties and understandings with Iran that were heretofore unacceptable.

If America can no longer be counted on, this will have profound implications for the entire region. In fact, our unwillingness to challenge Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has put Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the position of having to deter Iranian ambitions themselves, threatening further nuclear proliferation.

President Obama encourages goodwill, a gesture that should be applauded, but he ignores the realpolitik in the region. When I asked an Iranian about imperial design on a “Shia Crescent” in the Middle East, he smiled and said, “We want a full moon.”

Alas, diplomatic gestures of the kind the president embraces are fine, but soft power has an effect when and only when there is hard power behind it. That apparently is a lesson President Obama has not yet learned.

— Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute.


ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
President Obama’s Cairo speech should have been called “a pretend beginning” rather than “a new beginning.” To the extent it wasn’t dangerously naïve, it provided little more than warmed-over left-wing dogma: Obama portrayed Islam and the world as he and other progressives would have them (the president said “progress” eleven times), rather than as they are — under the risible claim that his desired “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”

In Obama’s bowdlerized Islam, the Koran teaches merely that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” Quite apart from the fact that the president simply purged the very next inconvenient verse (which, as Robert Spencer points out, mandates the crucifixion or mutilation of those who fight against Allah and Muhammad), many in the Muslim world — not just terrorists — subscribe to a supremacist interpretation of scripture that does not regard non-Muslims as “innocents.”

The president implicitly denies the scriptural underpinnings of jihadist terror, which will not go away just because he declines to acknowledge them. And in many ways he denies the specter of terrorism itself: Palestinians practice not so much terror but “resistance through violence and killing”; Iran does not so much sponsor terrorism as “play a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians” — 30 years of jihadist savagery the president suggested were an understandable reaction to the covert American role 56 years ago in the coup against Iran’s leftist (but democratically elected) government. Meantime, Israelis and Americans are supposed to be understanding and accommodative, which will supposedly induce reason from those who seek their annihilation in Tehran and, as the president put it, in “Palestine.” And we should lay down our arms (especially our nukes) because it is somehow having them — rather than not having them — that destabilizes the international order.

It’s a fairy tale, but it would not have a happy ending.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).


JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
Barack Obama, America’s first black president — the living repudiation of the sad, painful history of racial discrimination in America — gave a speech in Cairo today. He said that “America and Islam share common principles . . . justice . . . tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

He was hosted, as he said, “by two remarkable institutions,” one of them Al-Azhar University, which “for over a thousand years has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning.” What is wrong with this picture?

Al-Azhar is a vast complex, offering degrees in religion or in medicine, engineering, and other secular fields. Its hundreds of thousands of students pay little tuition, since it is financed by state funds.

Nonetheless, the student body is not restricted to Egyptians. As Wikipedia puts it, “Alongside the Egyptian students . . . there are many other students from the various Islamic and European countries. These foreign Moslem brothers have exactly the same rights as the Egyptian students.”

True — but Al-Azhar is closed to Copts, Christians who make up 10 percent of Egypt’s population and who pay more than 10 percent of the taxes that pay for Al-Azhar. Non-Muslims of any kind are not eligible for admission.

— Joshua Muravchik’s new book, The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, has just been released by Encounter.


DANIEL PIPES
Barack Obama’s mention of “7 million American Muslims” in the course of his rambling and complex 6,000-word address to the Muslim world from Cairo symbolizes the whole message.

Study after study has found that demographic figure about three times too high. But Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America relentlessly promote the notion of 7 or even 10 million American Muslims. Obama’s accepting their version amounts to a giveaway, a cheap way to win the approbation of Islamists who so widely influence Muslim opinion.

“Giveaway,” indeed, defines the whole speech — inexpensive nods, tips of the hat, and salutations to win Muslim favor without initiating new approaches or embarking on new policies. The speech confirms Obama’s personal efforts (note how, in keeping with his past practice, he uses the word “respect” ten times in this speech) as well as the established practice of American political leaders to promote Islam, tell Muslims what their religion really means, avoid references to radical Islam, and excoriate violent Islamism while accepting the non-violent variety.

On other issues too — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Arab-Israeli conflict, democracy — Obama reiterated his known policies.

In brief, he broke little new ground but raised to new heights the art of sugaring words in ways appealing to Islamists.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.


GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
If I put myself inside the mind of a typical Egyptian, or a typical Muslim listener — and I readily grant that I am likely to be off base in my conception of how such a listener thinks — I would regard the speech, and the man delivering it, as a remarkable spectacle, a demonstration that there is a different, more inviting, more intelligent, more sympathetic, better America than the one with which Middle Easterners are relentlessly confronted in images and voices carried across the region by Al Jazeera and a virulently anti-American, anti-Western mass media. In other words, the speech achieved the president’s central objective handsomely.

That said, calling on Hamas to put an end to violence and to recognize Israel’s right to exist is either disingenuous or naïve. This incomprehension of the political, religious, and psychological mentality of that terrorist movement — and presumably the same incomprehension extends to the motive force behind other terrorist movements and other pathological forces in the region — augurs ill for a resolution of the Israel–Arab conflict on which the president has now staked the prestige of his office. One does not have to be a student of Aesop to know that begging a wolf to act like a lamb is a good way to get eaten alive.

— Gabriel Schoenfeld is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.


AMIR TAHERI
The speech could do a lot of harm. Obama endorsed the basic claim of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Ali Khamenehi, who divide the world  into Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) and Dar al-Harb (House of War).

By abandoning Bush’s Freedom Agenda, Obama could encourage despots whose brutal role has given radical Islamists, acting as opponents of the established order, a certain legitimacy.

Obama’s position on women in Islam was pathetic. And he made no mention of the tens of thousands of trade unionists, journalists, and women’s- and human-rights activists languishing in prison in most of the 57 countries with Muslim majorities. By promising to promote aspects of Islamic sharia, such as the payment of zakat, and the use of “hijab” by women, in the U.S. itself, Obama undermines the position of those Muslims who oppose the sharia in Muslim-majority countries.

Also, Obama committed the U.S. to supporting the Saudi initiative known as Interfaith Dialogue and the so-called Alliance of Civilizations, a Turkish-Spanish joint venture. The issue has never been debated in the U.S. Americans should know that both initiatives present religion as a legitimate vehicle for politics, something that American political tradition has shunned, at least so far.

A speech is no substitute for policy. Obama has no Middle East policy, a fact certain to be exposed before long. He has no policy because he lacks the big idea around which policy is made.

In the Middle East today, those who fight for democracy and human rights are unhappy.

— Amir Taheri is an Iranian-born journalist based in Europe, and author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.


BAT YE’OR
Pres. Barack Obama was elected, by an overwhelming majority, on a program in which America’s rapprochement with Islam stands pre-eminent. This is a legitimate political aim in the quest for world peace. The questions are: how to achieve it, and why there is no reciprocal effort from the Muslim world represented by the Organization of the Islamic World (OIC). This body could express its regrets for over a millennium of jihad wars, land expropriations, enslavements, and humiliations of the conquered non-Muslim populations on three continents.  

Obama’s Cairo discourse fits perfectly into his agenda. It flatters Muslim sensibilities and expresses the Muslim view of historical tolerance and cultural superiority over infidel civilizations. When Obama mentioned the “Isra” event, he referred to Muhammad’s ascension to heaven and his return in one night on a winged mule named Buraq. There he greets two Muslim prophets, Moses and Jesus/Isa, who are not the biblical figures. The image used here by the American president as a symbolic interfaith reconciliation between the three faiths is a meeting between three Muslim prophets and not the figureheads of the three monotheistic religions. Besides, the Isra event is not recognised by non-Muslims, and it didn’t happen in Jerusalem, as this name does not appear once in the Koran.

The president’s speech is similar to many such declarations by European leaders. The question it raises is how much the West is ready to forgo truth and its basic principles in its supplication for obtaining peace with Islam. Clearly, the full Islamization of the West is the quickest way to obtain it. Obama’s political program in connection with the Alliance of Civilizations conforms to an OIC strategy that has already been accepted by the EU. In history, this policy has a name: the dhimmitude syndrome.

— Bat Ye’or’s latest book was published in Italy: Verso il Califfato Universale, Come l’Europa è diventata complice dell’espansionismo musulmano, Lindau, Torino: May 2009. (Toward the Universal Caliphate: How Europe Became an Accomplice of Muslim Expansionism.)