Presidential outreach to Muslims overseas

Unlike NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, neither Daniel Goldman nor Ralph Peters thinks President Obama's upcoming speech to the "Islamic world" from Cairo, Egypt is a good idea. Moreover, Robert Spencer finds the president's assertion that the United States is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world" astounding and peculiar. In this -- and, I hasten to add, this alone -- Goldman, Peters, and Spencer appear to agree with Osama bin Laden, albeit for very different reasons.

I suspect the objections of commentators to the political right of Mr. Friedman are the kind of thing that Obama and his advisors did not even think about while indulging their mania for pressing the "reset" button. In the unlikely event that objections to making a conciliatory speech in Egypt were raised by people who saw nothing unusual in January's assertion that "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus," President Obama's dismissal of those objections doubtless came, like that curious description of the American melting pot, from his Inaugural Address: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them."

One almost hopes that the president said that, rather than variations on the same theme seasoned with an f-bomb or two by Chief of Staff Emanuel.

But the objections are thoughtful, and not so easily dismissed, even if you're one of those who thinks that "dialog" trumps all. Over to you, Goldman:

"To speak to the "Muslim world" is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness."

Goldman knows that some of his readers will instantly murmur "specifics, please," and so he provides a few:

"By addressing the "Islamic world" from Cairo, Obama lends credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other advocates of political Islam who demand that Muslims be addressed globally and on religious terms - in contradistinction to nationalists such as Mubarak. Rather than buttress a loyal ally, Obama's speech undermines him on his home ground. That is a lose-lose proposition.

There is a way to rescue the situation, which I now propose to Obama in good faith: change the venue to New Delhi."

That suggestion will be ignored, as will Joseph Loconte's reservations, which have mostly do with the criminal excesses of the Mubarak regime. So here's Ralph Peters, with something he wants the president to think about:

"I can't alter his speech, but I ask our first multi-racial president to bear in mind two things during the brief flight between Cairo and Riyadh: The Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt were the earliest, greatest and most tenacious enslavers of black Africans. And the Saudis are the leading sponsors of religious hatred in the world today.

Who owes whom an apology?"