‘The most destructive address in the history of American foreign policy’, is the verdict of Ralph Peters on President Obama’s Cairo speech. We agree.

This is the worst time imaginable to have a pro-Islam leftist occupying the Oval office.

Taking a realistic, and consequently pessimistic, survey of the Islamic lands from the Mediterranean to the border of India – and the sole exception to their failure, the small singular Jewish state beleaguered among them – Peters writes in the New York Post:

No region — not even sub-Saharan Africa — competes with the greater Middle East when it comes to wanton savagery, thwarted opportunities and the danger posed to innocent populations around the world. With fanatical terrorists of unprecedented brutality, Islamist extremists pursuing nuclear weapons, rogue regimes, disintegrating states and threats of genocide against Israel, the lands of heat and dust between the Nile and the Indus form a realm of deadly failure that will haunt the civilized world throughout our lifetimes.

A survey of the region’s key countries — and problems — doesn’t offer much good news for the Obama Administration’s naive foreign policy efforts:

LEBANON: This isn’t a country — it’s a temporary stand-off. Recently, Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose father, Rafik, was assassinated by Syria, had to make a humbling visit to Damascus. Syria’s decades-long penetration of the government in Beirut and various Lebanese factions (not least, its backing of the Hezbollah terror organization) has kept Beirut dependent on Damascus to break the political gridlock in parliament. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has been rearming mightily in the wake of its 2006 war with Israel. A new war would devastate much of Lebanon — if internal strife doesn’t do it first.

EGYPT: A US client long counted among the most stable states in the Middle East, Egypt faces a potential succession crisis as octogenarian president Hosni Mubarak, who’s ruled the country for almost three decades, grooms his singularly unimpressive son, Gamal, to take over upon his death. The government and armed forces are more factionalized than they seem to outsiders, Islamist movements have proven ineradicable, and violence against Egypt’s minority Christians is on the rise again…

TURKEY: Long in NATO, but denied membership in the European Union, Turkey has grappled with an identity crisis. Increasingly, its political bosses back an Islamic identity. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) soft-peddles its religious agenda when dealing with the West, but has been methodically dismantling the secular constitution left behind by Kemal Ataturk — who rescued Turkey from oblivion 90 years ago… Will the military move to preserve the legacy of Ataturk? Unlikely. But if the generals did move, the Obama administration would back the Islamists…

SYRIA: The neighborhood’s in such awful shape that this police state’s beginning to look like a success story… On the other hand, the Assad family’s government backs terrorism, harbors remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime, still hopes for Israel’s destruction — and wouldn’t mind having nukes, if it could figure out how to get them. When Damascus looks like a beacon, it’s getting awfully dark in the Middle East.

ISRAEL: Civilization’s last hope in the region, Israel remains the target of international leftists dreaming of another, more-thorough Holocaust. The “peace process” will continue to fail. Arabs need Israel to blame for their failures. And President Obama empowered the worst Arab elements with his Cairo speech, which convinced the dead-enders there’s no need to compromise with Israel — that the US would shift its support to the Arab cause. That Cairo speech may prove to have been the most-destructive address in the history of American foreign policy.

IRAQ: Can’t say we didn’t try. After years of serious progress toward a national compromise, Shia political agents close to Iran recently banned over 500 influential Sunni candidates from standing in Iraq’s upcoming elections. Reconciliation has come to a screeching halt. The Shia are smug, the Sunnis feel betrayed, and the Kurds are still denied title to the traditionally Kurdish city of Kirkuk. Every faction’s fighting for a greater share of oil revenues. And the Obama administration’s AWOL (this was Bush’s war — we wouldn’t want a positive outcome)… the old blood feuds and thirst for vengeance go deeper than we thought…

SAUDI ARABIA: Its two main exports are oil and fanaticism. Saudi funding supports a global effort to drive Muslims into the fold of its severe Wahhabi cult — and to prevent Muslims (including those in the US) from integrating into local societies. The Saudis care nothing for the fate or suffering of fellow Muslims (check out the Palestinians). They care only for their repressive version of Islam. The birthplace of Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s differences with his terror organization are over strategy and tactics, not over their mutual goal of forcing extremist Islam on all of humanity.

IRAN: Racing to acquire nuclear weapons, delighting in the prospect of a cataclysmic war that would lead to the “return of the hidden imam,” beating the hell out of its own people in the streets, murdering members of the intelligentsia, and explicit in its vows to destroy Israel, the government of Iran continues to be protected by China and Russia. There will be no meaningful sanctions. Over the next few years, we’ll see a nuclear test in the southeastern desert region of Baluchistan. Will Israel strike first? Perhaps. Would the US? Not under this administration. The best hope is for a miracle that leads to a popular overthrow of the current maddened regime. But strategy can’t be based upon the expectation of miracles.

YEMEN: It’s Saudi Arabia without oil, running water or literacy. Perhaps the most-backward country in this stubbornly backward region, Yemen has harbored terrorists for years (we really didn’t want to know). Its government cannot control its territory, its tribes are so fanatical they alarm the Saudis (who have had to fight them), and Iran backs the Shiite minority in its revolt against the state. Throw in Yemen’s strategic position astride the world’s most-sensitive oil-shipping routes, and this pretense of a country looks far more important than Afghanistan.

DUBAI: The late Michael Jackson’s flirtation with this high-rise bazaar apparently couldn’t rescue an economy built on sand…

AFGHANISTAN: We’re there, and we don’t know why. We know why we went in 2001, but al Qaeda’s long gone. Initially, we were welcomed. Now, the more troops we send, the stronger the Taliban becomes. We’re tied to a corrupt, inept government despised by the people. Afghans won’t fight for that government, but they’ll give their lives for the Taliban. And we’re determined to turn the place into Disney World.  Should we just leave? No. Afghanistan provides a crucial base for striking the terrorists across the border in Pakistan… Afghanistan is worthless in itself. Instead of concentrating on killing our enemies, we’re buying worthless real estate with American blood.

PAKISTAN: 180 million anti-American Muslims, thanks to generations of politicians who took American aid while playing the anti-American card with their constituents. The government won’t crack down on the Taliban factions it’s preserving for a reconquest of Afghanistan after we exit… Promised another $7.5 billion in aid, Pakistan’s response has been not only to bite the hand that feeds it, but to gnaw it to a bloody pulp. And, in an act of strategic folly, we’ve left our troops in Afghanistan dependent upon a single supply line that runs for over a thousand miles through Pakistan. .. Isn’t it about time we got a grip? Around Pakistan’s throat? … Leaving the greatest power in history at the mercy of the impossibly corrupt regime in Pakistan guarantees that our troops lives are wasted next door in Afghanistan. Afghanistan isn’t our problem. Pakistan’s the problem.

In his Cairo speech, Obama painted a graphic picture of the sufferings of slaves, and went so far as to liken the plight of slaves in America in the past to the (self-inflicted) condition of the Palestinians in the present, implying that the Israelis are guilty of holding them in subjugation and inflicting extreme cruelty on them. A bigger lie, a more extreme libel is hardly possible. At the same time he does not choose to notice  that Arab Muslims are the world’s most persistent and unashamed slave owners. They keep, buy, sell and cruelly use slaves, most of them captured or bought in Africa.  

With fully justified righteous indignation, David Podvin writes in Canada Free Press:

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo exemplified the craven liberal compulsion to appease evil. While progressives accuse conservatives who oppose affirmative action of being racist, Obama lavished praise upon his Muslim audience that enslaves millions of Africans. America’s first black president uttered nary a word on behalf of Islam’s many black captives. Liberals once opposed slavery rather aggressively [depends wh0 you mean by liberals - JB], but now ingratiate themselves to the slave masters.

Obama also abandoned gays to the predations of Muslim zealots. Although liberals have vilified Miss California USA for opposing gay marriage, Obama did not issue even the mildest rebuke to the Muslim world for perpetrating gay murder. When Mormons support traditional matrimony, progressives publicly explode in anger. When Palestinians commit homophobic homicide, the Left is unable to generate any discernible outrage.

The Obama speech failed to confront the barbarism of Islamic misogyny. Across the Koranic world, women are relentlessly abused. Islamic females are routinely flogged, sexually mutilated, and subjected to honor killings by their Muslim brethren. Yet Obama so yearned to avoid offending Muslim misogynists that his fleeting reference to Islamic women drew moral equivalence between their plight and the situation facing their American counterparts. Muslim females must deal with having their genitals disfigured while Western women must deal with the corporate glass ceiling. Obama equated these asymmetrical forms of bigotry, fecklessly declaring that all humanity must improve its treatment of women. His unwillingness to confront specifically the sadistic misogyny of Islam leaves imperiled Muslim women without the advocacy they so desperately need.

Obama forfeited a precious opportunity to champion the cause of the blacks and gays and women who are persecuted by Muslims. Theoretically, the welfare of these groups is of paramount importance to liberals. In reality, progressives concern themselves with the oppression of blacks and the slaughter of gays and the torment of women only when such injustices can be used to gain political advantage against Republicans…

Liberals not only refuse to condemn the racism and homophobia and misogyny being perpetrated by Muslims, they also smear as “Islamophobic” anyone who does object… Jihadists constantly commit atrocities while their liberal sycophants insist that Islam cannot be held responsible for the evil committed in its name… 

The liberal devotion to Islam constitutes history’s greatest unrequited love. Every social principle that progressives claim to cherish is rejected by the Muslim world:

Freedom of speech… Freedom of the press… Separation of Church and State… Civil rights…Women’s equality…

Liberals insist that these tenets are incomparably precious. Islamists could not disagree more. As Obama has proven again, progressives eagerly capitulate whenever protecting their cherished beliefs conflicts with the higher liberal principle of appeasing Islam.

Barack Obama’s speech was an amoral profile in cowardice. It therefore faithfully represented the modern liberal movement, which is extremely long on rhetoric, painfully short on backbone, and totally devoid of integrity.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”  

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within  the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

In his much-heralded “Muslim world” address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people’s “situation” is “intolerable.” Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations — Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 — rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas alike — built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people’s suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one [two actually, see our post immediately below - JB] concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Self-defeating? While we agree with almost everything in this column, we question whether what Obama is doing is ‘self-defeating’.  For America, certainly. But for Obama himself? No. He has shown every sign of intending to augment Muslim power and prestige, and a willingness – no, an eagerness – to sacrifice Israel to that end.  

From Investor’s Business Daily:

In the torrent of analysis of the president’s Muslim speech, a major policy shift went largely unnoticed. We now endorse equal opportunity regarding what countries can have atomic weapons.

President Obama’s Cairo University address to the world’s Muslims on Thursday squandered a historic opportunity that perhaps only a president with a Muslim father and a Muslim name could have utilized: effectively rallying the Islamic world against Iran as it pursues nuclear weapons.

Instead, he did pretty much the opposite, declaring that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”

This is multilateralism taken to its reductio ad absurdum. Since the dawn of atomic weapons, it has been mostly the United States’ job — what Harry Truman called “an awful responsibility which has come to us” — to act as a kind of global nuclear custodian.

Truman made no bones about defending our building of the bomb, noting that the Nazis “were on the search for it” and that “we know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.”

That Democratic president made it clear to the world that “Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.”

If we are honest with ourselves today, we must admit that even now, nearly six-and-a-half decades into the nuclear age, there remains no foolproof means of controlling the bomb. It continues to be, in Give ‘em Hell Harry’s words, “too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world.”

So it is chilling to hear a U.S. president go to Egypt and, after issuing an unprecedented apology for the 1953 CIA coup that kept Iran and its oil from the clutches of Iran’s direct neighbor to the north, the Soviet Union, declare that Iran has “the right” to nuclear power — which it can easily use to build bombs.

There is nothing new in a president calling for “a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons,” as Obama did in Cairo. Ronald Reagan expressed such hopes. But isn’t contending that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons” the opposite of zero nuclear tolerance?

How is it a step toward a nuclear-free world when we announce that the West should stop practicing what might be called “nuclear discrimination?” Tehran will interpret Obama’s words as carte blanche to pursue its goal of building a nuclear weapons arsenal.

According to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has now amassed 1,359 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride. It has nearly 5,000 centrifuges up and running — and is making it more difficult for international inspectors to scrutinize its nuclear program.

Yet at the G-8 foreign ministers conference at the end of this month in Italy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will rub shoulders with Tehran’s diplomatic mission, invited to attend by the Italians, just as if Iran were Finland or New Zealand or any other civilized nation, not the Islamofascist threat to the world that it is.

Neither Europe nor the U.N. has the willingness or the fortitude to “pick and choose” multilaterally which nations can be accepted into the nuclear club. Only the U.S. can lead in such an “awful responsibility.”

But last week in Cairo we apparently relinquished that grave duty.

To our consternation,  many conservative commenters have failed to see the evil in Obama’s Cairo speech.

Fortunately, some are more discerning than others. Caroline Glick has written a very perceptive piece , worth reading in full. Here’s a part of it:  

Obama’s “straight talk” to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to “justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.

In a like manner, Obama’s tough “truths” about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.

On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are “unbreakable.”

Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign – and therefore unjustifiable - intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.

The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.

This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the “reconstitution” – not the creation – of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.

But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history.”

He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.

Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel’s rebirth, was Obama’s characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners’ treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, “resistance.”

But as disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First, he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second, he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.

Obama argued that the first policy will facilitate peace and the second policy will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that neither of his policies can possibly achieve his stated aims. Indeed, their inability to accomplish the ends he claims he has adopted them to advance is so obvious, that it is worth considering what his actual rationale for adopting them may be.

The administration’s policy toward Jewish building in Israel’s heartland and capital city expose a massive level of hostility toward Israel. Not only does it fly in the face of explicit US commitments to Israel undertaken by the Bush administration, it contradicts a longstanding agreement between successive Israeli and American governments not to embarrass each other.

Moreover, the fact that the administration cannot stop attacking Israel about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, but has nothing to say about Hizbullah’s projected democratic takeover of Lebanon next week, Hamas’s genocidal political platform, Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, or North Korean ties to Iran and Syria, has egregious consequences for the prospects for peace in the region.

As Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas made clear in his interview last week with The Washington Post, in light of the administration’s hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority no longer feels it is necessary to make any concessions whatsoever to Israel. It needn’t accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It needn’t minimize in any way its demand that Israel commit demographic suicide by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as full citizens. And it needn’t curtail its territorial demand that Israel contract to within indefensible borders.

In short, by attacking Israel and claiming that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace, the administration is encouraging the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole to continue to reject Israel and to refuse to make peace with the Jewish state…

The only reasonable explanation is that the administration is baiting Israel because it wishes to abandon the Jewish state as an ally in favor of warmer ties with the Arabs. It has chosen to attack Israel on the issue of Jewish construction because it believes that by concentrating on this issue, it will minimize the political price it will be forced to pay at home for jettisoning America’s alliance with Israel. By claiming that he is only pressuring Israel to enable a peaceful “two-state solution,” Obama assumes that he will be able to maintain his support base among American Jews who will overlook the underlying hostility his “pro-peace” stance papers over…

By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.