Following President Obama's speech in Cairo last week, we asked a number of Israelis for their reaction. Some were mesmerized by his oratory but others remained skeptical and profoundly concerned that the speech was one more sign the U.S. might one day abandon the Jewish state.
Here are some more reactions about Obama's speech from the Internet:
Daniel Pipes wrote:
Barack Obama's mention of 'seven million American Muslims' in the course of his rambling and complex 6,000-word address to the Muslim world from Cairo symbolizes the whole message.
Study after study has found that demographic figure about three times too high. But Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America relentlessly promote the notion of seven or even ten million American Muslims. Obama's accepting their version amounts to a giveaway, a cheap way to win the approbation of Islamists who so widely influence Muslim opinion.
Richard Hellman, president of CIPAC, the Christian Lobby for Israel, analyzed Obama's speech and concluded the following:
". sadly, his "soaring rhetoric masked a sad reality" that includes
- An Iranian government that is on the verge of achieving nuclear-arms capability to carry out their genocidal threats to eliminate Jewish Israel, a capability and threat that have been confirmed, not removed, by Obama's offers to talk
- The bold threat to Israel from the Obama team is that if Israel does not agree to remove almost one half million Jews from most of biblical Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria , and the Golan Heights, and turn over all of the holy sites to terrorists, the U.S. will not deal with Iran's nuclear weapons -- or let Israel do so; and
- The facts that Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah's leaders, whom Obama hinted he will work with if they are backed in elections, are still terrorists at war with us and Israel."
Avner Boskey of Final Frontiers commented on the spiritual tone of Obama's message:
Though Obama states in Cairo that 'Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,' the Koran and Islamic religious texts deny this. When the President stands in the shadows of Cairo's Al Azhar University and hints that 'among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's' -- he is trivializing the unpleasant truth that Al Azhar and the Koran clearly reject Christianity and Judaism as viable faith alternatives and that they call for the denigration, enslavement or destruction of these religions' followers.
President Obama's end-time vision is that 'all of us have a responsibility to work for the day when.the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims.' Yet the Scriptures actually state that the land of Israel is a gift to the nation of Israel alone and that unfriendly Gentiles who settle there over the ages will not have any guaranteed inheritance. President Obama's last days vision may sound nobly inclusive, but it is not God's truth.