When you think about it, this is a bold move by Obama. Could you imagine Bush giving a speech in a Muslim country? Not on your life. For years, presidents have shied away from doing anything new or creative to help bring about Middle East peace. Former presidents have stuck with the status quo. But finally, Obama is saying there has to be a little give and take by everyone, including Israel, which is usually left to do whatever it wants. Already, of course, people are saying Obama hates Jewish people, both inside and outside of our country.
This could be one of Obama's most important speeches ever. Still, it's only a beginning.
Egyptian novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif talks to NPR's Robert Siegel:
When President Obama delivers his address to the Middle East on Thursday from Cairo, he will face the legacy of names like Haditha, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, places that have become more symbol than geography over nearly a decade of perhaps the most traumatic chapter in America's relationship with the Muslim world.What do Egyptians and Muslims want to hear from Obama's speech tomorrow?
More than any other president in a generation, Obama enjoys a reservoir of goodwill in the region. His father was Muslim. His outreach in an interview with an Arabic satellite channel, a speech to Turkey's parliament and an address to Iranians on the Persian New Year have inclined many to listen. Just as important, he is not George W. Bush.
But Obama will still encounter a landscape in which two realities often seem to be at work, shaped by those symbols. There is America's version of its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, defined in recent years by the legacy of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. There is another reality, from hardscrabble quarters of Beirut and Cairo to war-wrecked neighborhoods of Baghdad, where distrust of the United States runs so deep that almost anything it pronounces, however eloquent, lacks credibility, imposing a burden on Obama to deliver something far more than the unfulfilled pledges of Bush's speeches. WaPo
Egyptian novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif talks to NPR's Robert Siegel:
SIEGEL: Put us in the mind of students at Cairo University who might hear this speech. What could an American president say or do that would conceivably say or do that would be meaningful to them?Egypt readies for Obama. Here's something strange--Obama as King Tut.
SOUIEF: Right, well if we're talking about a wish list, I think just listening to a lot of people here over the last few days people would really like to hear something substantive rather than sort of affirmations that Islam is a great culture and so on.
It would really be quite nice if the president's speech would address all the people of the world. The constant pinpointing of Muslims and the Muslim world that has been so much of Western discourse over the last decade is really something that President Obama needs to turn away from.
It was very much the discourse of the previous administration and even when it's used to say 'Oh, Islam is a great faith, we have no problem with it,' it is still fudging the issues. Because the issues are political rather than cultural.
And so that's really point number one, which is to address political, economic issues and to address the interest of the people rather than make cultural statements to do with Islam.
SIEGEL: When you speak of those issues, you mean what for example?
SOUIEF: Well, topmost in everybody's mind really is the question of Palestine. That is absolutely at the center of all the conflicts in the region. The conflicts that we're living through. The one's that we've had... The president has already spoken about settlements.
We need to hear more. That's what I hear everybody (say). And we need a specific mention of Gaza. The predicament of the people of Gaza, the 1.5 million who are under siege is a very, very hard one and it's close to everyone's heart.
