OBAMA Speech in Cairo was a 10+ AMAZING !!!

Mox, maybe you could give the guy another week or so? Before you jump in with both feet. I agree with harpo. I'm just not that cynical. The guy posts time certain dates for withdrawing, for closing, for offering specific legislation, and I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he will carry through by those dates, and not hit the panic button well before he has had time to fulfill his commitments. This is like me telling you that I will meet you on the corner Saturday at noon, and Thursday evening you are bitching that I probably won't be there. Wait and see. It is your rush to judgement that I find distasteful.
 
This thread is about Obama's recent speech and its meaning for the Muslim world (or lack thereof). I've said nothing about him not carrying out promises he has given dates for, I hope that he does close Guantanamo and other similar prisons, withdraw fully from Iraq etc...
 
Moxon said:
I'm assuming the givers of plaudits here have been inspired sufficiently to go to the occupied territories and lay down before bulldozers clearing land for more illegal Israeli settlements.

Which gives me an excuse to quote from yet another recent piece, this one in dissidentvoice:

Whenever western leaders lecture us about a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, they rely on those comfortable, woolly words “negotiation” and “peace process”… it’s a convenient crutch.


Kick away the crutch and they’d finally have to grasp the nettle of justice, something they have always avoided.

President Obama, speaking the other day in a BBC interview, said he believed the US was “going to be able to get serious negotiations back on track” between Israel and the Palestinians. Asked about Israel’s defiance of his call for a halt to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Obama urged patience, saying it was early in the conversation. “Diplomacy is always a matter of a long hard slog. It’s never a matter of quick results.”


Diplomacy hasn’t produced a result in 61 years, and he made no mention of implementing international law and enforcing UN resolutions. Like others, he much prefers the soft and fluffy option of negotiations that go nowhere and a “process” that is doomed to fail, enabling Israel to pursue its evil designs indefinitely. In their minds, and for some unexplained reason, Israel is exempt from laws, conventions, codes of conduct and respect for human rights that other nations of the civilised world are expected to observe. It is allowed to act the brutal aggressor with impunity.

Note: I'm not saying Obama is the personification of evil (that would be Cheney). All I argue is that he's a weak, vacillating, spineless, cautious, indecisive "leader" with no real principles or scruples, and with a flair for rhetoric. He is not going to be the catalyst for any real change. No more than Clinton and Carter were before him. Well ... at least Carter brokered a deal between Israel and Egypt.
 
HDM said:
Wait and see. It is your rush to judgement that I find distasteful.
Absolutely. It's almost as if the judgement was made first, the justification for it was thought out second.

Anyone attacked so viciously by both extreme right and extreme left certainly gets the benefit of my doubt.
 
Obama spoke of Islam's respect for "justice, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings".

In Saudi Arabia he referred to the King as "His majesty". Let'e be clear: the king is an absolute monarch. There is no democracy whatsoever in Saudi Arabia. Only Islam may be practiced as a religion. The punishment for converting to Christianity or any other religion is death. There are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. They are not permitted. This is tolerance?

Justice: Sharia law as practiced in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere prohibits women from anything approaching equal rights. Saudi women can not leave the country without the permission of their husbands or fathers. They can not drive cars. They can not be seen in the company of a male who is not a relative. The penalty for adultery, homosexualty and other un-Islamic offenses is DEATH. This is justice?

The dignity of human beings. How do Islamic states that deny humans basic rights respect human rights?

Who is Obama kidding?
 
The election of Obama in the U.S. was a media coup. No one who gets into the skin of the people who founded what was once the great United
States would ever for one second have thought of voting for that no good high school values scoundrel.


What a joke !!! It is like the majority voting block had turned into a bunch of giddy junior high school girls and fell in love with outward personality rather than approaching it from a more mature perspective.


Just because he can speak well does not mean that there is any treasure inside of him. Anyone who has good speaking ability can follow a teleprompter.


Any empty headed goof ball who is brain washed by CNN and ABC etc. and did not do their research of Obama's background and voted for Obama stabbed the great USA in the back with a knife of betrayal.


He is pushing the U.S. closer to the brink of slavery just like his comrade Bill Clinton did when he was president.


:eek:


P.S. It is awful fishy that one of the only people who could have testified that Obama was not born in the U.S. and thus was not legally qualified to be president, died during Obama's campaign when a demand was made for a certified copy of his birth certificate. I am talking about the strange timing of the death of Obama's grandmother.
 
Wow - It still makes me laugh reading some of the conspiracy theories and crazy out there. Like him or dislike him based on his actions but not based on insane conspiracy theories.

I think his speech contained some very significant points and yes, it is nuanced in diplomatic language but refering to Palestine as an entity instead of the "future state of Palestine" is a seismic shift in policy.

I thought the speech was nuanced, well-written and a good beginning. There is much that needs to be done and will require a great deal of pressure on both Israel and the "street" in the Middle East by the US gov't. I would hope to see it occur and that this speech (which I personally think was an amazing start) was the precursor to major advances.

Obama isn't the savior, change isn't going to happen overnight but I do have a belief that he is laying the foundation for fixing many of the problems that have plauged the US and the world for the last 8 years.
 
citygirl said:
I thought the speech was nuanced, well-written and a good beginning. There is much that needs to be done and will require a great deal of pressure on both Israel and the "street" in the Middle East by the US gov't. I would hope to see it occur and that this speech (which I personally think was an amazing start) was the precursor to major advances.

Obama isn't the savior, change isn't going to happen overnight but I do have a belief that he is laying the foundation for fixing many of the problems that have plagued the US and the world for the last 8 years.

Citygirl, I find your comments more chilling than anything Dudester, Harpo, and HDM have written. Of course the speech was "nuanced" and "well-written": Obama and his speechwriters must have paid a lot of attention to the detail, the polish, and the delivery. But all you are going to see is promise on the horizon -- and that promise will keep receding. How many times in the last ten or twenty years have we seen and heard of progress with regard to the "peace process?" What are the realities that stop any kind of justice being meted out to the Palestinians? Subtle changes and shifts of emphasis in speeches are not going to change this. Leave this kind of vacuous analysis to the disingenuous US TV pundits.

In like vein, there is nothing subtle about the US missile attacks in Pakistan. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine are in turmoil and under an iron heel; along comes a smooth-talking snake oil saleman and American liberals swoon in amazement. Perhaps they want to be deceived; perhaps there's a desperate need on their part to believe. Diplomatic talk usually camouflages brutal realities.

Anyway, wait another three months, six months, two years ... hang on, it's only his first term -- we can't ignore electoral realities, he'll really deliver during his second term.
 
Amazing! If you want to be "chilled" by anything at all, you might read davejohnson333, to whom citygirl is responding. Chilled is the mildest word I can think of for that kind of thing. What hole do these people crawl out of?

I recognize sarcasm when I see it, most of the time, but there is a large strain of truth in yours. Yes, let's give the guy more than a few months into what is very likely going to be an 8-year run, before we start tossing out our judgements of his accomplishments. Might we give him a year to actually accomplish something in the face of political realities (a two-party system where one is always intent on blocking whatever the other wants to accomplish) in Washington, before we start yelling that he's a great big failure?

What kind of life do you people lead where success must be satisfying and instant, or it is failure?
 
HDM said:
What kind of life do you people lead where success must be satisfying and instant, or it is failure?

It's not a question of yelling that he's a failure. It's that constant pressure needs to be exerted on his administration to deliver specific results. Otherwise they will not occur. Look at his team -- they're recycled Clintonistas or from the Wall Street that's complicit in the economic crisis the country now finds itself in. Look at what he's doing militarily. Look at the gravity of the situation -- with the US teetering on the brink of a depression (if it's not already there). And then ask yourself whether subtlety in speech is what's really required. He needs to announce he's pulling out of Iraq now, and likewise for Afghanistan. There are no strategic objectives to be fulfilled in that country. The US has made a hash of it. Obama is lingering on there with the same bloody-minded obstinacy with which Nixon stayed on in Vietnam. Obama needs to cut military outlays drastically and now. On the domestic front, he needs to stop bailing out the Wall Street scoundrels who underwrote his campaign and do something about the real economy -- where 10% of Americans are now on food stamps and where real unemployment (not the bogus official figures) is arguably nudging 20%. Yet there is not a hint of anything radical on the table. Obama hasn't got a clue and he hasn't got the cojones. He does know how to look grave and somber. And American liberals swoon at what a dandy figure he cuts, how eloquently he speaks.

It seems the choice in the USA is between evil Republicans and mediocre, spineless, status-quo Democrats.
 
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