From Real Clear Politics, the text of 0bama’s speech.
A fair deal of it was nice rhetoric, adequately delivered. Much to my surprise, 0bama even denied the Holocaust deniers. But the part I found most instructive:
For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.
O RLY?
Some might disagree:
Yeah, yeah, the TOTUS can read a speech well enough. But if he and his handlers are such ideologues that they want to whitewash the history of his own nation (ahemMiniTruahem)… what does that say?
Plus: an expectation that this speech will result in a damned thing other than scorn is naive.
10 Responses to “TOTUS’s speech in Cairo”
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I’m just relieved he cleared up that whole “America, Muslim nation?” question for us. Who’d a thunk it!
And the list of Islamic achievements, every single one of them existed before Islam was created. Islam has in fact rolled back scientific and technological advancement, has in fact killed people who where attempting to make scientific and technological advancements. And it consistently holds those trapped in Islam in a state of hardship, oppression, illiteracy, and starvation. Focusing most especially on women.
And Barri wants America to embrace all of that.
I think he was referring to when the Civil Rights movement finally won civil rights for all black people in the US.
2Hotel9
Wow, you’re a pretty sectarian bloke – don’t like those Muslims at all.
When you studied Algebra – that was because of an Islamic man.
Algorithms – Islamic too.
The Arab world were also practising early forms of modern medicine when Europeans were bleeding patients to death.
Don’t look at a star chart – you might see Aldebaran!
Scott;
The Civil War “freed” the slaves it took the civil rights movement to gain:
“full and equal rights” YOU know this you are just choosing to ignore it. I’d suggest getting your head out of your “republican” place and quit leaping to find ANY fault so as to justify your dislike for the President.
It’s demeaning and not to him…
I also don’t expect that anyone actually thinks this speach or anything else is going to ‘get-through’ to the hard-line radicals running Al-Qauda or hundreds of other “funny-mentalist” factions that are coming together under thier network. Those are not the people the speech was meant to reasure and begin dialog with, it’s the thousands and hundreds of thousands of more moderate muslims that have been used to fund Al-Qauda, etc by playing on their fears of western culture and especially of the United States as the evil, powerful, and uncaring Crusader that would smash the muslim world and reshape it in its Christian image.
This is plain and simple damage control to show the world that unlike the previous administration THIS administration is willing to talk to other nations and try diplomacy instead of just resorting to intimidation and force.
It of course remains to be seen if this administration will be willing to respond WITH force and intimidation when required, but from what I’m seeing of the movement and deployment of military assets around the world I’m guessing the answer will be yes they will.
That’s one major issue I always had with the Bush administration, (the other being the fixation on Iraq which blinded them to other developments but that’s another post or three :o) despite having a wealth of ex-statesmen, presidents and diplomats to draw from the administration invariably kept to a small core of hard-line “shuttle” diplomacy action-teams that would jump from spot to spot keeping nations ‘in-line’ rather than actually engaging in diplomatic discussions. The attitude displayed and ‘discussions’ that took place were more akin to “the boss” telling minions what to do rather than a discourse among equals.
That’s going to be a serious diplomatic history we are going to have to overcome to regain the trust of even other western nations, let alone the Arab world.
Randy
>The Civil War “freed” the slaves it took the civil rights movement to gain:
“full and equal rights” YOU know this you are just choosing to ignore it.
No, it was Teh Won who ignored it. Without the War Of Southern Aggression, there would have been no civil rights movement.
> I’d suggest getting your head out of your “republican” place…
Please define “republican place.”
> and quit leaping to find ANY fault so as to justify your dislike for the President.
Oh, hell, I don’t need to “leap” to find fault with this incompetant jackass. His first 100 days filled my storeroom to overflowing with reasons to dislike him. He just continues to keep pouring nonsense onto an already overloaded dungheap.
> The attitude displayed and ‘discussions’ that took place were more akin to “the boss” telling minions what to do rather than a discourse among equals.
Ah. So Sudan is the “equal” of the United States.
Sorry, I don’t believe it. Some nations are better than others, some worse. The US has long been one of the best, if not *the* best. Of course, Obama and his race to socialism could well bring that to an end. Do *you* have an extra trillion dollars to cough up to fund his scams? Does the idea of a VAT on top of – not in place of – the income tax appeal to you?
> That’s going to be a serious diplomatic history we are going to have to overcome to regain the trust of even other western nations, let alone the Arab world.
Why should we want to? Did FDR give a damn about whether the Nazis “trusted” the US?
Starviking: Most, if not all, of the Arab “scientific advancements” were either pre-Muslim Arab advancements, or Arab copies of Greek, Roman or Indian advancements. “Arabic numerals,” for instance, are Indian. From wiki:
Al-Khwārizmī, Persian astronomer and mathematician, wrote a treatise in 825 AD, On Calculation with Hindu Numerals. (See algorism). It was translated into Latin in the 12th century as Algoritmi de numero Indorum (al-Daffa 1977), whose title was likely intended to mean “Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians”, where “Algoritmi” was the translator’s rendition of the author’s name; but people misunderstanding the title treated Algoritmi as a Latin plural and this led to the word “algorithm” (Latin algorismus) coming to mean “calculation method”. The intrusive “th” is most likely due to a false cognate with the Greek ἀριθμός (arithmos) meaning “number”.
Note: “Hindu Numerals.”
But more importantly: in recent memory, what great advancements in science or philosophy have come from the Muslim world? The last 100 years? The last 500 years? Hell, the last 1000 years?
As for the whole “Crusader” thing: being a non-Christian, I’ve got no dog in that fight. However, I’ll point out that the Crusades began as an effort not to conquer the Muslim world… but to *take* *back* regions that the Muslims had conquered from the Christians. Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq… these regions had all been Christian regions until the Meccan fanatics came out of the desert and put them to the sword.
“Starviking: Most, if not all, of the Arab “scientific advancements” were either pre-Muslim Arab advancements, or Arab copies of Greek, Roman or Indian advancements.”
Did I say anything to that point? I’ll note that Greeks advancements built upon knowledge from Egypt and Babylon. Nothing wrong with advancing on the foundation of other peoples’ knowledge.
“But more importantly: in recent memory, what great advancements in science or philosophy have come from the Muslim world? The last 100 years? The last 500 years? Hell, the last 1000 years?”
Well, the last 1000 years is a bit silly. 1000 years ago the Islamic world was much more advanced than the Western World. Around 500 years ago we had the last great Islamic Mathematician “Abū al-Hasan ibn ʿAlī al-Qalaṣādī from that point on the Islamic world began losing ground economically and militarily to the Western World. Kind of hard to be pushing the bounds of science when you’re getting chunks taken out of you by other nations.
Also, what the hell do you have against their achievements in the past? Take a look at your Supercarriers – I could be petty and go: but how much of that technological wonder is American – Steam Catapults, Angled Decks, Mirror Landing Aids…but I won’t – because despite the origin of the key inventions that made them possible they are still amazing achievements of engineering.
Ooops – some kind of mess-up with a html tag there – Sorry.
> Nothing wrong with advancing on the foundation of other peoples’ knowledge.
True. But the problem is, the Islamic world has produced very few advancements of its own. It has copied other peoples stuff; this turned out to be a benefit for the West, as the Islamic world remembered stuff that Christiandom self-deleted through cultural lobotomization.
> Kind of hard to be pushing the bounds of science when you’re getting chunks taken out of you by other nations.
And yet… China, Japan and India were all dominated/colonized/bitchslapped by western powers until very recently, but they still manage to do a hell of a job at pushing science, technology and, occasionally, philosophy.
The “boo hoo, we were abused 500 years ago, thus we should be excused for being ignorant assholes” bullshit has gotten pretty friggen’ old. The fact that your daddy may have drunked up and beaten you does not give you the right to do it to someone else. Same goes for cultures, including cultures terribly wrapped up in bad cults.
>Also, what the hell do you have against their achievements in the past?
Germany, and Germans, produced many great things in the 19th century… scientific advancements, music, philosophy, etc. Yet if I was a Jew in 1939 Munich, I think I could be forgiven for not giving a rats ass about them.
[…] allot sympathy and blame accordingly. That said, I still cannot quite believe Obama thinks that chattel slavery in America was ended without violence. Or that Islam was responsible for unprecedented breakthroughs in advanced math, sophisticated […]