Obama's Outreach Speech in Egypt

Obama's good intentions may be paving the road to hell, as David Frum comments on his upcoming gig in Egypt. (read)

Candidate Obama promised to deliver a major speech to the Muslim world from a Muslim capital. On June 4, President Obama will make good on that promise in Cairo. What could go wrong with this heartwarming outreach? Begin with this question: Does the president regard Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as belonging to the Muslim world, yes or no?

If yes – if “the Muslim world” includes everyone who happens to be born to a family of Muslim origin regardless of his or her own personal belief, and if it includes liberals of Muslim origin, secularists of Muslim origin, atheists of Muslim origin – then it seems almost pointless to speak to them all as a distinctive group.

The more likely answer however is no - Rushdie and Ali are not intended. Almost inevitably, the President’s speech will address the most anti-Western, the most militant, the most radical Muslims. The decision to speak “to” the Muslim world is a decision to speak “to” these rejectionists.

Nobody is sure what Obama is going to say to the Egyptians, but this could be the most important speech of this generation. It's a real chance to inspire free thinking in the Muslim world.

It's a huge challenge. Let's hope he doesn't blow the opportunity and do another boring, vacuous speech.

Hitchens on Media Self Censorship

Christopher Hitchens has another must read article, on the Vanity Fair website, about the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie and how that has frightened the media into pleasing fundamentalists. (Read the entire article)

So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn’t have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam. I brushed up against the unacknowledged censor myself when I went on CNN to defend the Danish cartoons and found that, though the network would show the relevant page of the newspaper, it had pixelated the cartoons themselves. And this in an age when the image is everything. The lady anchor did not blush to tell me that the network was obliterating its very stock-in-trade (newsworthy pictures) out of sheer fear.

Hitchens knocks down the multicultural sensitivity argument beautifully:

In other words, the situation is the exact reverse of what the condescending multiculturalists say it is. To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?

Unless we have more people stand up for the importance of free speech, I imagine it will get worse in the future. Children in school are taught that the worst crime is to offend somebody.