It’s safe to say that much of the Jewish world has been on edge, anticipating Obama’s Cairo speech today. Would he speak honestly, in this proud Muslim capital, a place where the founder of Islamic radicalism earned a degree in education 75 years ago, about Jewish concerns?
The New York Times web site is currently running this quote from Obama, as its first take, below the headline (“Obama Calls for Alliance With Muslims“), but above a photo of Obama:
“Anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust … Six million Jews were killed … Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful.”
He said this, with the entire Muslim world watching, a speech that, according to the Times, is available through White House-sponsored Web sites in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and is being translated by the State Department into 13 languages. It’s Obama’s hallmark: Honesty; unflinching truth — even-handed — even if — especially if — that truth is uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unappreciated by his audience.
Here is Obama’s full quote — it comes relatively early on in his speech – about the Holocaust:
“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”
At a time when the Iranian president, and much of the Arab world, denies the basic truth of the Holocaust – in a speech designed mainly to reach out to that world — these words take on out-sized importance.
Obama said many things today — and I hope to post again shortly — but one of them is this: Turn the page on hate by turning the page on the lies and canards that feed it.
It’s a speech for the Muslim world, but a message that will resonate throughout the Jewish world, too.
(Crossposted on National Jewish Democratic Council’s blog.)