Obama in Cairo: The Making of a Prophet?

Posted by Scott MacLeod Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 8:59 am

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President Obama's speech in Cairo today is the most important address ever given by an American leader about the Middle East. As he told 1,000 people at Cairo University and millions more around the world, everything won't be solved by a speech. Yet it was an unprecedented reach-out to Muslims and particularly to the Arab world. Far more than any other U.S. president in the past, he both acknowledged harmful Western policies during the Colonial and Cold War eras and promised an intense personal effort to resolve the region's problems and build a new era based on mutual cooperation and respect. The clear message Obama delivered—in his words, body language and statement of policies-- was that America is determined to be part of the solution in the Middle East. He didn't arrive or depart as a prophet, but for an American president treading into territory inhospitable to U.S. policies, he won some new adherents.

The audience responded to Obama's fine rhetoric and frequent quotations from the Koran with repeated applause. At the end as he stood on the stage and waved, a group of Egyptian students in the balcony rhythmically began chanting, “He's our man! He's our man!” When Obama spoke about democracy during the speech, one man in the audience shouted, “We love you!” But the audience also responded well to Obama's specifics, including a statement opposing Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank—an unusually strong display of criticism of America's ally, given that it was delivered from the heart of an Arab capital. When I asked him what he liked about the speech, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit, who personally welcomed Obama at Cairo International Airport a few hours earlier, told me: “Everything.” Agreed Mahmoud Essam, 14, a student at Towfeyeh school in Shubra, who also attended the speech: “All of it was fantastic.”

As he has done on other occasions, Obama shepherded credibility by pointing to his own Islamic roots. Even as he openly declared himself to be a Christian, he spoke proudly about the generations of Muslims in his father's Kenyan family, and of his own experience attending school as a boy in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country. What characterized Obama's speech as something fresh was its straight talk, an apparent attempt to win further political credit by acknowledging past U.S. policies that were detrimental and then to use that credit to demand better attitudes and actions from the Middle East as well. Obama recounted U.S. mistakes after 9/11, such as the invasion of Iraq, the establishment of the Guantanamo prison and use of torture against Muslim prisoners. But he called on Muslims to abandon the stereotype that everything America represents and does is bad, and physically bristled at the notion, still widespread in the Arab world, that the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. in 2001 was somehow justifiable.

The straight talk enabled Obama to glide through a minefield of competing interests. He appealed to governments (and equally to the Arab street) with his strong opposition to Israeli settlements and his demand that the region's leaders accept the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although he began by reaffirming America's unbreakable bond with Israel and his demand that Hamas cease terrorist attacks, it was a clear elbow in the direction of Israel's right-wing leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who favors settlements and opposes Palestinian independence. But he also won plaudits from many citizens and earned frowns from autocrats with his frank, forceful call for democracy, human rights and women's rights in Arab countries—and a warning to Arab regimes not to use the conflict with Israel to divert attention from needed domestic reforms. Obama continued his reach-out to the Iranian regime; he acknowledged Iran's right to nuclear energy while linking his opposition to it's nuclear program to fears about proliferation and escalating threats that would endanger Iranians as well.

Obama came to Cairo as part of the “conversation” with the Muslims that he started in his inaugural address, when he envisioned a new relationship based on mutual interest and respect. “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end,” he declared at Cairo University. Without a doubt, he now has the Islamic world listening.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo