Obama cracks down, but not hard enough

First, as a conservative, let's give some credit to President Obama's speech in Cairo. He did a good job in reminding the world about the existence of evil in his comments about the holocaust and he directly slammed president Ahmandinejad of Iran for pretending it did not exist. He did a good job in trying to get everybody to consider the other side's point of view to jump start a new peace initiative. He unequivocally defended Israel's right to exist and he is probably right in that Israel should stop its settlement expansion. But he missed two major opportunities and made a colossal mistake.

First, he should have reminded the world's Muslims that the USA has done more to defend Muslims in the last 30 years in Somalia, Kuwait, freeing Iraq and Afghanistan from tyranny, and defending Muslims in the Balkans from Christian Serbian slaughter than any other country on earth. And second, he essentially endorsed Iran's nuclear efforts despite European, Russian and Chinese agreement that Iran should never have access to nuclear capability. He threw in the towel on today's most dangerous threat to global security which will surely initiate a nuclear weapons race in the Middle East and force Israel to pre-emptively eliminate Iran's ability to fulfill its promise to annihilate Israel if it is not stopped.

He could have reminded the world that virtually everybody wants to stop Iran's nuclear efforts (including the Sunni Muslim majority in the Arab world) and we should all unite to that cause. But he chose appeasement and I fear that decision will have the same bad result as it did when Neville Chamberlain tried it with Hitler.

Randy Rossi

Grayslake