Joel Rosenberg Part 2

By Joel C. Rosenberg

(Washington, D.C., June 8, 2009) -- To be honest, it's taken me several days to process President Obama's speech in Cairo. But let me offer a bit of analysis now that I've had a little more time to think about it carefully.

First, the good news:

* It was important for the President of the United States to reach out to moderate Muslims -- to the Reformers, as I describe them in Inside The Revolution -- and explain America's desire to understand them, encourage them, and help them succeed. The vast, vast majority of the world's 1.3 billion-plus Muslims are not Radicals. They may not necessarily love the U.S., or Israel or the West, but they are not jihadists. They don't want their children to be suicide bombers. They don't believe in genocide. They want to live in peace and freedom. They want the opportunity to carve out a better life for themselves and their children. This is empirically true. And it should be acknowledged by President Obama as it was repeatedly by President Bush.

* It was important for the President of the United States to speak out on religious freedom and the fundamental human right for all people everywhere to be free to choose their religion for themselves. He did so, and it was good.

* It was also important for the President of the United States -- especially one now openly acknowledging his Muslim roots and his upbringing in the Muslim world -- to stand before a Muslim audience in an Arab capital and defend Israel's right to exist and explain the horrors of the Holocaust. He did so. And then, of course, he went on to the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to denounce such evil against Jews and against humanity, and vow never to let it happen again. "We've seen genocide," President Obama said at Buchenwald, a speech that was written as a corollary to Cairo. "We've seen mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground; children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war. This places teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others' suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests." This was good.

Now, the bad news....

[To read the rest of this analysis of the President's Cairo speech -- as well as to read analysis of yesterday's elections in Lebanon -- please go to the weblog by clicking here.]