Having just read Obama’s Cairo speech, my reaction is: Not bad. It could have been better. But it also could have been a lot worse.
Steve Hayes is right in noting that Obama could have talked more pointedly about the relative success of Iraqi democracy and the shocking denial of women’s rights in many Muslim countries, which is no way equivalent to “the struggle for women’s equality … in many aspects of American life.”
There were other examples of attempts to build false equivalence between the Western and Muslim worlds. For instance, he said: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” Of course most Israelis don’t deny Palestine’s right to exist as a Muslim state as long as it is willing to live in peace, whereas Palestinian leaders have shown no comparable willingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Another example of moral equivalency: “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.” That is accepting the (false) narrative of the Iranian Revolution, which holds that America’s role in overthrowing Mossadeq more than half a century ago — a development that would not have been possible had the leftist prime minister not lost support in the Iranian street — is just as bad as the campaign of mass murder and kidnapping that Iran continues to support at this very moment.
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