‘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.”

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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.

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Obama had one eye on Lebanon’s elections and the other on the carnage to come:
Clinton Threatens to Attack Iran ‘The Way That We Did’ Iraq

Blumenthal:
“For the first time, the premier clearinghouse for online news and opinions had suppressed one of my posts.”

Why does this surprise him?

by Medea Benjamin, CommonDreams.org, 4 June 2009

The Hamas government in Gaza reached out to President Obama on the occasion of his visit to the Middle East, announcing that Hamas was willing to talk to all parties “on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.” CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin, who carried the letter out from Gaza, said that the letter represented a significant development and an effort by Hamas to present a new face to the Western world. “While Osama bin Laden used the occasion of President Obama’s visit to deliver a scathing attack, Hamas reached out to a feminist U.S. peace group to deliver a letter to Obama urging dialogue, mutual respect and adherence to international law,” said Medea Benjamin.

In the letter, Hamas urged Obama to visit “our ground Zero” in Gaza and bring about a “paradigm shift” in the Israel-Palestine conflict based on enlightened world opinion and international law.

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Obama’s speech shows little real change. In most regards his analysis maintains flawed American policies

Ali Abunimah, guardian.co.uk, 4 June 2009

Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama’s speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama’s intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to “speak the truth as best I can”, there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between “America and Islam” – the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.

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Institute for Public Accuracy
4 June 2009

Chomsky, whose recent books include Interventions and The Essential Chomsky, sent the following to the Institute for Public Accuracy this morning:

“A CNN headline, reporting Obama’s plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads ‘Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.’ Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

“Keeping just to Israel-Palestine — there was nothing substantive about anything else — Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to ‘point fingers’ at each other or to ‘see this conflict only from one side or the other.’ There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

“Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

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Related:
IPA: Responses to Obama’s Cairo Speech