See, "The Crafting of Obama's Cairo Speech to World's Muslims."
The speech was roundly criticized at the time. Nice Deb has a roundup, "Obama’s Muslim Speech In Cairo." Atlas Shrugs has the text, "TEXT: Obama's Speech to the Muslim World." Also at Atlas Shrugs, "Obama to Ummah: 'America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam' Usama: Called for 'Long War Against Infidels'."
Read the Times piece here.
The President knew the Cairo address was pushing major political incorrectness. But he was determined to continue with his agressive global-groveling apology tour. This passage on the final revision of the speech really captures how badly the administration is working to appease our Islamist enemies:
'A musical impulse'"Rhodes" is Ben Rhodes, the lead speechwriter for the Cairo apology.
Obama went over the new text on Air Force One as he flew to an overnight stop in Saudi Arabia. As he read, he nodded, pausing now and then to ink in a thought or a suggestion.
That night, at the Riyadh ranch of King Abdullah, Obama had cardamom tea with the Saudi ruler. Emanuel went for a run in the 110-degree heat. Then Obama holed up with him, Axelrod and other senior staffers. Their buffet dinner simmered over cans of Sterno as they studied the text.
At midnight, the door to the staff work space creaked open. The president and his personal aide, Reggie Love, were delivering more changes.
On the two-hour flight to Cairo the next morning, Obama continued to tinker with the words and whisper parts of the speech to himself.
"He's very focused on both content and cadence," said Axelrod, "so he'll move the order of words around in order to get the cadence that he wants. . . . It's almost a musical impulse -- how the words play against each other."
Rhodes would punch each change into his laptop, then walk to the back of the plane and read them to the Arabic translator.
"You've had a tough job," Obama said as they landed in the Egyptian capital.
A motorcade sped them through the streets. Then, surreally, the frenetic pace was interrupted as the president paused to tour the Sultan Hassan Mosque, one of the world's oldest.
At one point, Obama told Rhodes:
"I know you've been under a lot of pressure to get this right," he said. "But this speech is way too cautious. We have to say everything and say everything candidly. I'm not going all the way to Cairo to do anything else."Yes, Obama didn't want to waste a chance to lay America prostrate once more before our enemies, and to sell out Israel while he was at it. As Anne Bayefsky put it:
President Obama’s meticulously planned and executed Egyptian speech marks the lowest point in the U.S. presidency’s understanding and appreciation of the Jewish state, its history, and its people’s future. Added to his administration’s evident infirmity on Iran, the speech of June 4, 2009, by the supposed leader of the free world will be remembered as a major decline in human history.It's heart-sinking stuff. And all the more reason to get this man out of power ASAP.
As Pamela Geller noted at the time of the speech:
Little did America know that Obama's objective would be a conversion of this nation to 'the largest Muslim country in the world'. From the moment he spoke as President, in the inaugural address, Islam was falsely given a preeminent place in the creation of America. In this speech, he quoted from the Koran three times. Why doesn't anybody comment on this? Why doesn't anyone ever comment on what he projected vs. what he is? Why won't all those talking heads state the obvious?We're seeing more evidence of that this afternoon.
Hey, the speech did have an impact - Iran felt free to beat down on its citizens in Tehran after a disastrous election.
ReplyDeleteThanks Skye!
ReplyDeletePretty disgusting speech. The only thing I can come up with is that NObama has been living in an alternate universe or he has a lot more dreams than I do because I don't remember seeing any of the shit he claims to have lived through.
ReplyDeleteThe Cairo speech inspired the Iranian reform movement. Before the speech, Ahmadinejad was leading by a comfortable margin. The reform movement only began to catch up in the following days and weeks.
ReplyDeleteIt also had a beneficial effect in Lebanon, where the pro-Western parties recorded a come-from-behind victory.
Historians will remember this as a significant speech. Its full effects have yet to be felt, but it's obvious that it already has fanned the winds of change in the Middle-East.
jasperjava - you know nothing about Iran to say that Obama's speech had some affect on the reform movement. The Iranians have been pushing reformers for years, a bit here, a bit there, and have felt as if they were, at least partly, a part of the process. If Ahmadinejad had won by a small margin, this revolt would not have happened. It would have been business as usual. What provoked the already-reformist-minded Iranians was the blatant fixing of the election, so they clung to Moussavi (not exactly a reformist) for lack of anything else to hold on to in order to vent their frustrations.
ReplyDeleteAnd if Obama did inspire the reform, he must have let them down pretty hard to not have taken a truly tough stance against the crackdown (when he finally did get around to making "tough" remarks it had been almost 14 days after the stolen election