Sara Haile-Mariam

Some criticism of The President’s speech today. I have no illusions, today’s speech wasn’t an anecdote to the World’s problems. However, I truly believe that the approach leveraged, that of empathy and emphasizing commonalities, is a winning approach. Nonetheless, it’s imperative to look at what the President didn’t do, in order to identify opportunities for additional dialogue and action.

Shirin Sadeghi

“At times in his speech, it was almost as if Obama in his elegant oration was pandering to the fundamentalists and the oppressive governments who have defined the Islamic dialogue for decades. He said that he does not want to be a prisoner of the past, but his speech was littered with history which, while accurate, is old news when it stands alone without direction or context.”

Peter Daou

“Yes, Obama is targeting the Arab ’street’ and global public opinion - but to the corrupt regimes that dominate that region of the world, his oration means virtually nothing. Repression and suppression will go on uninterrupted. And to those whose abiding hatred of Israel (and thus America) is absolute, Obama’s words will be seen as empty and hypocritical.”

Ira Stoll (h/t Ben Smith)

“The sections about the Palestinian Arabs were even weaker. He said of the Palestinians: “For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.” This buys into the claim that it was 1948, not 1967, that was the original tragedy for the Palestinian Arabs, and feeds the idea that the Palestinian Arabs have a claim to all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.”

Shmuel Rosner (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

“Obama’s Cairo speech had a misleading quality to it. The president was speaking the rhetoric of Reagan, while intending to execute the policy of George H. W. Bush. Conveying the image of an emotional, forthcoming, and understanding bridge-builder, he is actually a cautious and calculated leader, wanting to scale down America’s foreign policy–back to the days when “interests” were king, not ‘ideologies.’ Obama is a new type of the old ‘realist.; He is a realist with feelings–one that can naturally combine a call for halting Iran’s nuclear weapons because of ‘America’s interests’ (and others’) with his personal story of ‘an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.’”