Middle East Middle Ground - David Horsey
(TAG: Obama; jihad; Satan.)

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President Obama, in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, was a bit like the man walking down a street who is asked by two others to settle an argument over whether the earth is round or flat.

He thinks for a moment and then replies:

"Surely between men of good will, the truth must lie somewhere in-between."

Once again, as in his approach to conflicting views at home, Obama addressed the differences but emphasized areas of agreement or at least possible conciliation.

Critics immediately called his words a triumph of hope over reality, but what he said and how he said it marked his unique style of seeking common ground.

In reaching out to the Muslim world, the president was acting in much the same way he has sought at home to express willingness and desire to work with the Republican Party, even as many of its leaders rebuff his overtures.

In the primary initiative of his young administration, the huge stimulus package to combat the domestic financial and economic crisis, the congressional Republicans have him the backs of their hands. But he has persisted, and so far the polls indicate Americans have given him credit for trying.

That public attitude, abroad as well as at home, seems to be at least the immediate response to his remarkable Cairo speech.

 

He melded his unique ethnic and cultural persona with a balanced and uplifting message to a Muslim world not used to such candor from a Western politician.

Obama's familiarity and level of comfort with the religion of Islam, as well as his pointed dissociation with violence as a tenet of the core approach to its objectives, had to be disarming to Muslim ears across the globe.

The same probably can be validly said of his disavowal of American aspirations for the spread of global democracy, so recently seen as a centerpiece of U.S. policy in the last American administration.

 

The messenger no doubt made the most of his own ties to the Muslim culture, pointedly trading on his middle name of Hussein, so recently used by political foes in the 2008 presidential election as an implication of some kind of foreign and religious alienation.

Also, offering the traditional Muslim greeting, "May peace be upon you," in Arabic was not unlike the late John F. Kennedy, to whom Obama is often compared as an orator, telling the citizens of the old German capital: "Ich bin ein Berliner."

As much as both the message and the man delivered it, the means of conveyance -- a transmission via television of an American president's image and words to the far corners of the Muslim world -- was historic, a bridge seldom before attempted between East and West.

No one speech, no matter how eloquently and placatingly delivered, can be expected to close the breach existing on so many fronts between the two cultural, ethnic, religious and political universes. But Obama's confronting them was uncommonly bold and comprehensive.

Perhaps the most pointed example of the Obama middle ground was in addressing the central Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

First he reasserted that "America's strong bonds with Israel are well known" and that "this bond in unbreakable." Then he said "it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland," openly referring to Israeli "occupation."

 

Obama's words were in a sense only a reiteration of his predecessor's verbal commitment to a two-state solution.

But he went on to express opposition to continued Israeli settlements on occupied lands, saying it was time for them to stop.

In his call for "a new beginning" between the United States and the Muslim world, he was setting high expectations as he had in reaching out to the Republican Party at home, and similarly risking deflating rebuffs on many fronts.

But as the first black president of a country that not too long ago held men and women of color in slavery, he brought unusual credibility to his message to a global audience that had never before received anything like it from any powerful American political figure.

 

Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.)

(c) 2009 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

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