Obama's Cairo Speech: So Many Apologies So Little Time

6,000 words and half of them mush!

I've only started going through the speech President Obama delivered in Cairo Thursday. Full text is here. The first thing that struck me is that he could have delivered a really good speech by cutting half of it out. Yes, leave out the apologies and the mountain of moral equivalence and the Bush blaming which simply validates extremist ideology and it would have been fine.

But when you make statements like this what purpose does it serve other than to strengthen extremism?

OBAMA: Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Someone please inform me when the Israelis murder six million Palestinians, then we can talk moral equivalence between the Holocaust and suffering the Palestinians. All Obama did was excuse the violence that Palestinians continue to direct towards Israel despite the many concessions the Israelis have made.

Here's the Wordle of Obama's speech. The larger the word, the more times it was used:

6,000 words is a speech which approaches the snooze fests regularly delivered by nutcases like Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. What a shame any good parts of Obama's speech were lost in clouds of political correctness, moral equivalence, and Bush blaming.