I listened to the President's speech this morning and have read a fair amount of commentary about it since then. My initial impression was that our President is, indeed, a wonderful speaker when he has a script. His presentation was impressive and there was much to like in his speech. There are reasons for concern in his attempts at even-handedness, which all too easily blend into the worst kind of moral relativism, but he re-affirmed our commitment to Israel, forcefully attacked both 9/11 conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial, and made a good attempt to reassure that America is not at war with Islam.
[While President Bush made that same point countless times, there is no question that by dint of his own limitations of speech and disinclination to repeatedly make his case, in conjunction with a hostile media that rarely highlighted anything positive that Bush did, the meme that America was attacking Islam became widespread throughout the Middle East.]
There were two things that I wondered about:
First, how did his Arab audience hear the speech? I would love to hear from an Arabic speaker how the speech was translated into Arabic and how the Arabic speaking world heard his words. If there is anything we have learned in the last thirty years it is that words that appear to be equivalent in English and Arabic in the dictionary sense, often mean very different things to an English speaking versus Arabic speaking audience.
As just one example, which caught my attention and Elder's as well:
[President Obama] All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.
[Elder's comment] PBUH....this is dangerously pandering.
Language conveys all sorts of layers of meaning, only some of which are intended by the speaker. For Obama to use the PBUH construction is heavily laden with implications. I am curious as to how his Arabic audience heard this.
Second, what are the actual deeds planned by his administration to carry out the soaring rhetoric of his speech? President Obama has always used soaring rhetoric to disguise prosaic policies. As I noted in my post What Do the Arabs Want?, peace can only come when the Arab world undergoes a seismic shift, from desiring the deatruction of destroy Israel (60 years ago five Arab armies vowed to drive the Jews into the sea; today Hamas, Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah vow to finish the job Hitler started), to a position of tolerating a Jewish state on what they consider Muslim land. Until then, everything else is just posturing.
The best news is that apparently al Qaeda is horrified by the speech and worried that it will decrease the boiling rage toward America and the West that has been the baseline in much of the Arab world. A simmer rather than a boil will make us all safer.
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