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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (485666)	6/4/2009 3:10:16 PM
From: tejek	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574007

In Cairo, Praise for Obama's Remarks Wonder how it's playing on the settlements... Not good. He spoke in Arabic.....MORE THAN ONCE! No American president has ever dared to speak in Arabic nor visit a Muslim country first. While he is very careful to remind Muslims of America's strong ties to Israel, he is putting Netanyahu on notice.....keep up your sh*t and we won't be so close. And its about time!

To: Road Walker who wrote (485666)	6/4/2009 3:12:01 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574007

Varying Responses to Speech in Mideast Highlight Divisions Egyptians watched President Obama's speech on Thursday at a cafe in Cairo. By ISABEL KERSHNER, ROBERT W. WORTH and MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: June 4, 2009 JERUSALEM — President Obama’s carefully balanced message was greeted warmly by his immediate audience in Cairo on Thursday and in some other parts of the Mideast, but there was also dismissiveness and frustration. And among Israelis and Palestinians, reactions to a message designed to open each side up to the other seemed rather to reflect the fractures between them. Israelis and Palestinians picked at the content of the sweeping speech almost like a biblical text, finding reassuring passages and more ominous ones, depending on which side of their political spectrums they came from. Israelis on the far right, for example, blasted Mr. Obama for what they said was his casting of an equivalency between the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians in two concurrent paragraphs of his lengthy address. “How dare Obama compare Arab refugee suffering to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust?” asked Aryeh Eldad, a parliamentarian from the rightist National Union Party, adding that Mr. Obama might understand the difference better when he visits the Buchenwald concentration camp in the coming days. It was a mirror image of the reaction in Gaza, where Ahmed Youssef, the deputy foreign minister of the Hamas government, criticized the speech for not going far enough on Palestinian issues. “He points to the right of Israel to exist, but what about the refugees and their right of return?” Mr. Youssef said of Mr. Obama’s remarks, leaving out that Mr. Obama also said Palestine’s right to exist can’t be denied. “As a legal specialist,” Mr. Youssef added, Mr. Obama “should know people are under occupation, and they can not recognize the state while they are under occupation, only afterwards. Why put pressure on Arabs and Muslims to recognize Israel while it is not recognizing our existence?” At the same time, analysts and politicians on both sides also acknowledged there were no shortage of positive statements in the speech to buttress their own causes. Israelis noted that that Mr. Obama referred to America’s bond with Israel as “unbreakable” and defined Israel as a “Jewish homeland,” an important point of contention with the Palestinians; they also appreciated his unequivocal condemnation of Palestinian resistance through violence, including rocket attacks, and his condemnation of Holocaust denial. Palestinians noted that Mr. Obama plainly spoke of their own nation, calling it “Palestine,” and praised his willingness to acknowledge the depth of Palestinian suffering so deeply. Many lines in Mr. Obama’s speech drew applause from the audience in the elegant Cairo University hall where it was held, but perhaps none so expressively as those lifted from the Koran, which emphasized Islam as a religion of justice and equality. The president’s respectful treatment of the religion, and his elegiac recounting of the achievements of Muslims through history, resonated strongly with many throughout the region, who seemed delighted by it. Even those who took strong issue with some of the speech’s political points acknowledged that its tone, rhetoric, and overall sense of empathy were strikingly new. “I think his performance was marvelous,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a professor at King Saudi University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “He seems so much more sympathetic, so much more understanding of the feelings, attitudes and perceptions of Arabs and Muslims. I think it was a speech with a vision, it was designed to set the stage for a new beginning.” Even the way Mr. Obama began his speech, with his use of the phrase “peace be upon him” after mentioning the Prophet Muhammad, and his opening greeting — “Peace be upon you” in Arabic — struck a chord with many people, particularly in Saudi Arabia, the deeply conservative desert kingdom where Islam was born. “Starting the speech with the words ‘salaam aleykum’ was a really good approach,” said Ghina Sibai, a 32-year-old art director from Beirut, Lebanon, in comments echoed by others across the Arab world. “It’s kind of like a peace treaty. He’s trying to address the Muslim world through its own culture.” 1 2 3 Next Page nytimes.com