The venue was carefully chosen and the words well crafted as well as only Barack Hussein Obama can. The US President's speech at the University of Cario will go down in history as the speech that marked the end of an era of hostility in the Middle East and is as important for peace in the region as the Fullton speech of Sir Winston Churchill was in staring the Cold War. If peace could be achieved by making pretty speeches there would be no need for statecraft and dipplomacy. Afterall Thucydides was well aware of this when he wrote of hte Corcyrean Affair, the dispute between Corinth and Athens that really started the Peloponesian War. The University of Cairo was the home of Ibn Khandun, the most famous historian of the Arab world in the thirteenth century and Barack Obama was certainly in the right locale to give a grand speech. If Sir Walter Scott is to be believed even Sir Richard the so called lion heart, admired the minarets of the Great Mosue near the University.
People from across the World weccomed the speech as it is for the first time that a serving US President has stated unequivocally that the Holocaust was a terrible price to pay for freedom and by implication recognised that the Palestenian Uprising of 1948 called Nakba was also a significant event. Popular iconography has enshrined the horrors of the Holocaust in the minds of people across the world by we have been largely ignorant of the horrors of the Nakba, when a whole people were uprooted and sent into oblivion. This particulat recognition of the moral equivalence between the two horrible events will not go down well with the Israeli Right Wing but will find broad acceptance all over the region. The US President has spoken clearly of the need to put an end to the new settlements that are coming up in the West bank. I think the commitment to a viable two state solution to the problem has been strongly stressed by the President. The Jewish intellectual Gideon Levy has stated that Obama "walked with wisdom and sensitivity between the Holocaust and the Nakba between Israelis and Palestenians, between Americans and Arabs between Christians, Jews and Muslims. Finally we have a President who is using the immense bully pulpit of the American Presidency to walk the peace talk.
Ecven in Iran the reaction has been muted. With the Iranian Presidential elections round the corner, all the candidates keenly followed what the US President had to say. While the talk of nuclear negotiations did not occupy much space, the President made it clear that he seeks a new relationship.
The US Administration has begun the long overdue task of redefing itself, reinventing the American Identity as it were in the region. There is a new dawn of peace and I wish that it is sustained.