Obama in Cairo

Obama’s speech to the Egyptians is the sort of pious boilerplate to which I have always had an allergy, but in terms of content it’s pretty hard to beat if only because it relocates our foreign policy outside of the Van Allen radiation belt. The drenched neocon ravings of the Bush years were so extraterrestrial that a sober recapitulation of reality sounds like a doctoral thesis by an interdisciplinary team at M.I.T.

Obama sounded a little pedantic to my ears in patiently reminding everyone that there are both Israelis and Palestinians living in the Middle East and that not all Muslims like to commit violent acts. This shouldn’t be terribly impressive under normal circumstances, but for painfully obvious reasons, it was.

His speech stroked Arab and Muslim cultural pride, acknowledged what bugs them and appealed to them for partnership—pretty much the strategy he has used with congressional Republicans since January. Let’s hope he gets more cooperation from the Saudi monarchs and Hamas.

All the same, there were definite nuances that sounded quite fresh and unusual. For example, Obama said Israeli settlements in the occupied territories ‘violate previous agreements’, a sharp retort to the current Tel Aviv line that they got the green light from Bush to do whatever they want.

Obama also referred to the ‘Holy’ Koran several times, not something we got used to hearing from the evangelical Christians around W.

He also held up our pluralistic example as something worthy of being emulated although the current state of tolerance for religious diversity in the U.S. is open to debate after the assassination of an abortion doctor last week.

Many commentators have said already—some in advance of the event itself—that the real message of Obama’s speech is him giving it. The image of a mixed-race leader representating a majority white population has got to trigger a psychological disconnect for some listeners in the Arab world who wouldn’t think of supporting someone not of their tribe or ethnicity or religion. Given who he is, Obama could afford to be generous because anyone who is listening to him is forced to concede one of his main points: America isn’t so easily summed up. He embodies new possibilities and challenges his listeners to make the most of them.