THE CAIRO SPEECH, STILL MAKING NEWS - AT 9:45 A.M. ET:  No presidential speech in recent memory has been more examined than President Obama's "outreach" show to Muslims, delivered in Cairo.  The speech, if we judge reaction correctly, has had virtually no impact in the Muslim world.  But many clear-thinking commentators, examining it, have been appalled. 

The president is a bright man.  But he is not, contrary to public image, an intellectual man.  He exhibits little curiosity, and there's no evidence that he reads as widely as, say, former President George W. Bush, who did read widely.

Here, Victor Davis Hanson examines the president's ignorance of history, as revealed in the Cairo speech.  Not an encouraging picture:

In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation...

...Almost every one of his references was either misleading or incomplete. He suggested that today’s Middle East tension was fed by the legacy of European colonialism and the Cold War that had reduced nations to proxies.

But the great colonizers of the Middle East were the Ottoman Muslims, who for centuries ruled with an iron fist. The 20th-century movements of Baathism, Pan-Arabism, and Nasserism — largely homegrown totalitarian ideologies — did far more damage over the last half-century to the Middle East than did the legacy of European colonialism.

And...

Obama also claimed that “Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.”

In fact...

Europeans, Chinese, and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation.

Do you get the sense that the student may have to repeat this course?

In reference to Iraq, President Obama promised that “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” Is he unaware that the United States imposed democracies after World War II?

Yes, he's unaware.

Obama also stated: “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.”

With all due respect to our president, this assertion is again not fully accurate. The only thing that ended slavery in the United States was the Civil War, which saw some 600,000 Americans — the vast majority of them white — lost in a violent struggle to ensure that nearly half the country would not remain a slave-owning society. Also, the massive urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly violent.

Details, details.  This historian doesn't understand that when the Divine One speaks, details are not important.

This list of distortions could be easily expanded. President Obama, in elegant fashion, may casually invoke the means of politically correct history for the higher ends of contemporary reconciliation. But it is a bad habit. Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama included.

COMMENT:  And yet, the mainstream media refuses to clamp down on Obama.  Hanson includes other historical distortions the president made in other places, like saying in Germany last year that he didn't look like other Americans they'd seen representing the U.S. - forgetting that our last two secretaries of state have been African-American.

Can you just imagine if Bush had delivered an inaccurate speech?  The press, which obsessed over whether the Bush administration outed CIA employee Valerie Plame, would have gone bananas.  (That's not an intended insult to the banana community.)

Obama gets away with it.  He's probably supplied more misinformation to school children than any other president, aside from Bill Clinton's lamentations about sex.

June 12, 2009