More on Obama's Cairo speech: fatigue!

At a dinner at a friend's place, I commented that Obama's speech was perhaps more well received in the West than in the Middle East. I am actually tired of his big speeches; of course, the problems are immense and varied, and big speeches maybe needed. But, I think I am developing Obama fatigue. It will be neat if for a few days he can kind of lie low and let others do the speechifying!

I agree with the following comment in Cohen's column in the NY Times:

“Some of his sentences and paragraphs are a little complicated for the average listener. It sounds as though he thinks he’s speaking to the M.I.T. faculty or the New York Times editorial board.”

Indeed!

And how about this also from Cohen:

All the rhetorical groundwork the president has now laid — on Iran, Israel-Palestine, the Muslim world — will come to nothing if high principle is not matched by street-smart cunning and maneuver. Obama’s got to get off the podium and down into the bazaar if he’s going to come home with the goods.

Yep. This is what I was telling my friends at the dinner table. Which is also why I do not agree with Friedman's comment that it is not Obama but the Middle East countries that ought to act; Friedman writes:

“It’s not what he says, but what he does,” many said. No, ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, it is what he says and what you do and what we do.

Eyeless in Gaza

Roger Cohen's short piece in the NY Review of Books has a title that is a play on the old idea that an eye for an eye will end up leaving everybody blind.  Actually, Cohen has an even better metaphor to describe the tragic and atrocious Israeli military campaign in Gaza: "As Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations and former soldier in the Israeli army, has observed, the Gaza offensive "seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."

Cohen writes that: 

Only in the Middle East do the dead rule. As Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, once observed, the dead vote in Jerusalem. Their demand for blood is, it seems, inexhaustible. Their graves will not be quieted. Since 1948 and Israel's creation, retribution has reigned between the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.