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RufusW
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Busan
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 7:53 am Post subject: |
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This kind of stuff is the height of naivete.
Sadly, Obama is just a bag of hot air. Giving a speech will not fix anything. Yet all the media lapdogs are covering his "historic" speech (according to ultra-apologist for islam Juan Cole).
"I'll keep doing what Bush did and give a speech and then muslims will stop wanting to kill Americans". Naive. Naive.
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LITTLE ROCK - A Muslim convert accused of killing a soldier Monday outside a recruiting center may have been considering other targets including Jewish and Christian sites - and had the firepower to carry out more attacks, according to law-enforcement officials.
A joint FBI-Homeland Security intelligence assessment obtained by the Associated Press said officers found maps to Jewish organizations, a child-care center, a Baptist church, a post office, and military recruiting centers in the Southeast and in New York and Philadelphia. |
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/20090604_Suspect_may_have_had_other_targets.html
This is the second time in two-three weeks an African American convert to islam has gone off the deep end for jihad. Obama might want to take note that all the hot air, platitudes and hope! in the world didn't stop his AA brothers from hunting the infidel. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:15 am Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
This kind of stuff is the height of naivete.
Sadly, Obama is just a bag of hot air. Giving a speech will not fix anything. Yet all the media lapdogs are covering his "historic" speech (according to ultra-apologist for islam Juan Cole).
"I'll keep doing what Bush did and give a speech and then muslims will stop wanting to kill Americans". Naive. Naive. |
Why, mises! It warms the cockles of my heart to see that you've come around.
I especially loved the irony of this statement:
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| This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| Giving a speech will not fix anything. |
It doesn't fix things, but words do have powerful effects.
They can be brought up again and again as quotes. People do act on them. While words don't fix things, they do have an affect. |
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RufusW
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Busan
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:15 pm Post subject: |
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Well I thought it was a great speech for many reasons.
It was concise and clear, he laid out issues and tackled them. While restating (resetting) America's position he also left little doubt about what he expected from Muslim countries. He didn't shy away from issues like the need for democracy or women's rights.
He purposefully attacked Bush: 'Iraq was a war of choice' and mentioning the fact America will say the same in private as it does in public (possibly reference to Bush's secret Israeli deals).
He explicitly said America was not at war with Islam, something the majority of American's believe (and want). He also had a jab at Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' which a lot of Neo-Conservatism is based upon. Getting past this ideology is the key to peace.
Although he failed to get into the nitty-gritty of Israel/Palestine he did say, "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He's drawing a line and expecting the opposing sides to come together to get it done. If he's in power for 8 years I'd expect a lot of progress.
| Mises wrote: |
| Giving a speech will not fix anything. |
Giving a speech lays out his (and consequently America's) beliefs and ideology with honesty. It was an appeal for dialogue, compromise and understanding. I hope this is translated and disseminated widely in the Middle East.
Dialogue and honesty will always help international relations more than hostility or threats. Obama knew the fine line he had to tread and did it perfectly. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:22 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
"I'll keep doing what Bush did and give a speech and then muslims will stop wanting to kill Americans". Naive. Naive. |
[url=http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2009/06/obama_lowers_ex.html]
No, not at all.[/url]
| Obama wrote: |
I also don't want to, you know, load up too many expectations on this speech. After all, one speech is not gonna transform very real policy differences and some very difficult issues surrounding the Middle East and the relationship between Islam and the west.
But I am confident that we're in a moment where in Islamic countries, I think there's a recognition that the path of extremism is not actually gonna deliver a better life for people. I think there's a recognition that simply being anti-American is not gonna solve their problems. The steps we're taking now to leave Iraq takes that issue and diffuses it a little bit.
And the question then is, how do we now go forward with an honest, serious-- relationship based on mutual respect and-- and mutual interest? And so what I hope will happen, as a consequence of this speech, is people will have a better sense of how America views its relationship to the broader world and to Islam....I do hope that we can start opening a dialogue that'll be more constructive moving forward. |
Last edited by Kuros on Thu Jun 04, 2009 7:09 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 6:54 pm Post subject: |
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| RufusW wrote: |
Dialogue and honesty will always help international relations more than hostility or threats. |
Dialogue:
Them: Hey, stop bombing us!
Us: No, thanks.
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Them: Hey, be muslim!
Us: No, thanks.
And when a Republican takes the White House in 3.5 years, and America is still in Iraq and the escalation in Afghanistan is escalating, all the "dialogue" and lovely speeches will be shown as the empty platitudes they are. We will be further down the path towards total war with the so-called "muslim world".
We don't need dialogue. You cannot dialogue with an apparent "world" that defines itself on an imaginary friend. We need separation and nothing more. |
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:24 pm Post subject: |
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Well, old Fiskie liked it:
Robert Fisk: Words that could heal wounds of centuries
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It was a clever speech we heard from Obama yesterday, as gentle and as ruthless as any audience could wish for � and we were all his audience. He praised Islam. He loved Islam. He admired Islam. He loved Christianity. And he admired America. Did we know that there were seven million Muslims in America, that there were mosques in every state of the Union, that Morocco was the first nation to recognise the United States and that our duty is to fight against stereotypes of Muslims just as Muslims must fight against stereotypes of America?
Related articles
But much of the truth was there, albeit softened to avoid hurting feelings in Israel. To deny the facts of the Jewish Holocaust was "baseless, ignorant and hateful", he said, a remark obviously aimed at Iran. And Israel deserved security and "Palestinians must abandon violence..."
The United States demanded a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He told the Israelis there had to be a total end to their colonisation in the West Bank. "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
The Palestinians had suffered without a homeland. "The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable," Obama said and the US would not turn its back on the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for a state of their own". Israel had to take "concrete steps" to give the Palestinians progress in their daily lives as part of a road to peace. Israel needed to acknowledge Palestinian suffering and the Palestinian right to exist. Wow. Not for a generation has Israel had to take this kind of criticism from a US President. It sounded like the end of the Zionist dream. Did George Bush ever exist?
Alas, he did. Indeed, at times, the Obama address sounded like the Bush General Repair Company, visiting the Muslim world to sweep up mountains of broken chandeliers and shredded flesh. The President of the United States � and this was awesome � admitted his country's failures, its over-reaction to 9/11, its creation of Guantanamo which, Obama reminded us all again, he is closing down. Not bad, Obama...
We got to Iran. One state trying to acquire nuclear weapons would lead to a "dangerous path" for all of us, especially in the Middle East. We must prevent a nuclear arms race. But Iran as a nation must be treated with dignity. More extraordinarily, Obama reminded us that the US had connived to overthrow the democratically elected Mossadeq government of Iran in the Fifties. It was "hard to overcome decades of distrust". |
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:32 pm Post subject: |
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Or did he...?
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When he started talking about the "coalition of 46 countries" in Afghanistan � a very dodgy statistic � he began to sound like his predecessor. And here, of course, we encountered an inevitable problem. As the Palestinian intellectual Marwan Bishara pointed out yesterday, it is easy to be "dazzled" by presidents. This was a dazzling performance. But if one searched the text, there were things missing.
There was no mention � during or after his kindly excoriation of Iran � of Israel's estimated 264 nuclear warheads. He admonished the Palestinians for their violence � for "shooting rockets at sleeping children or blowing up old women in a bus". But there was no mention of Israel's violence in Gaza, just of the "continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza". Nor was there a mention of Israel's bombing of civilians in Lebanon, of its repeated invasions of Lebanon (17,500 dead in the 1982 invasion alone). Obama told Muslims not to live in the past, but cut the Israelis out of this. The Holocaust loomed out of his speech and he reminded us that he was going to the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp today.
For a man who is sending thousands more US troops into Afghanistan � a certain disaster-to-come in the eyes of Arabs and Westerners � there was something brazen about all this. When he talked about the debt that all Westerners owed to Islam � the "light of learning" in Andalusia, algebra, the magnetic compass, religious tolerance, it was like a cat being gently stroked before a visit to the vet. And the vet, of course, lectured the Muslims on the dangers of extremism, on "cycles of suspicion and discord" � even if America and Islam shared "common principles" which turned out to be "justice, progress and the dignity of all human beings". |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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Talk is cheap.
Actions speak louder than words.
But credit where credit is due. He is the first American president to admit to this "conspiracy theory:"
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| In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. |
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:28 pm Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
Talk is cheap.
Actions speak louder than words.
But credit where credit is due. He is the first American president to admit to this "conspiracy theory:"
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| In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. |
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Yes, I was quite surprised. A much more mature approach than the Bush crowd. I must say I'm somewhat impressed with Obama - more than I expected.
Here is an attempt to analyse his speech:
Decoding the President: what Obama's words really mean |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Interested wrote: |
| bacasper wrote: |
Talk is cheap.
Actions speak louder than words.
But credit where credit is due. He is the first American president to admit to this "conspiracy theory:"
| Quote: |
| In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. |
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Yes, I was quite surprised. A much more mature approach than the Bush crowd. I must say I'm somewhat impressed with Obama - more than I expected. |
Yes, I am impressed that he can actually string together coherent sentences also. But, so what? As he has already demonstrated, he doesn't walk the walk.
To paraphrase mises, BO is saying,
"I'll just keep doing what Bush did and give some nice speeches." |
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lithium
Joined: 18 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 11:15 pm Post subject: Re: Obama addresses Muslim world in Cairo |
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All I heard was a man that hated his country. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:19 am Post subject: |
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| Obama submitted the same old cliched leftwingers' history of Israel, particularly with regard to the Palestinian refugees. I suppose he couldn't say anything different given his audience, but, well, isn't that very much the problem? I'm also fundamentally opposed to Obama's wishy-washy drivel about nuclear disarmament. Obviously, I agree we can't tolerate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, but it certainly doesn't follow from that premise that we can tolerate a world without nuclear weapons ("A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us" - Margaret Thatcher) |
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Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:31 am Post subject: |
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Diplomacy and statesmanship isn't cheap. Those who think that physical actions are the only criteria of leadership are lacking wisdom.
Reportedly, his words have resounded especially with young Muslims, and he's intelligently challenged key leaders to act in the best interests of future generations.
His continuing some of GW's policies is more indicative of pragmatism, and it should be noted that after the initial blunders of the Iraq war, some of Bush's strategic measures were probably necessary to keep things from deteriorating further. |
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