‘Obama Talks Democracy, Endorses Dictatorship’
Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa Al-Omrani
CAIRO, Jun 5 (IPS) – Egyptian officials are lining up to praise U.S. President Barack Obama’s address to the Islamic world delivered in Cairo Thursday. But local campaigners for political reform say the speech was disappointingly light on the issues of democracy and human rights.
“Obama spoke very briefly and in very general terms on these two subjects,” opposition journalist and reform campaigner Abdel-Halim Kandil told IPS. “Despite the hype, Obama’s speech was little more than an exercise in public relations.”
And despite merely suggesting a settlement freeze rather than freezing financial aid until they are dismantled, Obama is now the target of an international campaign that has yet to be condemned by Netanyahu.
Obama called a Jew-hater
04 June, 2009, 14:47
A campaign of defamation against U.S. President Barack Obama was launched by far-right Israeli activists Thursday, in anticipation of the president’s outreach to the Muslim world in his speech in Cairo.
A poster circulated by one group showed a montage of Obama in Arab headdress along with the slogan “Barack Hussein Obama; Anti-Semitic Jew Hater.” An identical montage with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Arab headdress had been carried by demonstrators shortly before his assassination by a right-wing Israeli extremist in 1995.
Obama had one eye on Lebanon’s elections and the other on the carnage to come:
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