White House planners initially considered Indonesia as the location for Barack Obama's much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, which he eventually gave in Cairo in June last year. Expectations then were probably impossibly high, and his address in Jakarta today did not get the same dramatic billing. Seventeen months on the mood has soured and polls show that his popularity is in decline across the globe as well as at home.
Yet the resonant vow that "America is not and never will be at war with Islam" is one that bears repeating in the wake of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and faltering attempts to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Obama went for candour, admitting that US relations with "Muslim communities" – a carefully chosen phrase – had frayed over many years but he repeated his resonant Cairo call for a "new beginning that creates a path for us to move beyond our differences".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/10/obama-indonesia-muslim-speech
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