Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama's Cairo Speech  —  I know many will gush over President Obama's Cairo speech and I'm likely swimming against the tide of the media and my fellow Democrats and progressives.  But reading the transcript, I was struck by two things:

Obama Calls for Alliances With Muslims  —  CAIRO — President Obama pledged on Thursday to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” imploring America and the Islamic world to drop their suspicions of one another and forge new alliances to confront violent extremism and heal religious divides.

Obama's Cairo speech: Surprisingly good  —  I didn't get the chance to watch Barack Obama's Cairo speech live, although I'm sure that it will be chopped up on YouTube within the next couple of hours.  Instead, I read the full text posted by Andrew Malcolm, as well as Andrew's commentary …

An Absolutely Extraordinary Moment  —  An African-American President with Muslim roots stands before the Muslim world and defends the right of Jews to a nation of their own in their ancestral homeland, and then denounces in vociferous terms the evil of Holocaust denial, and right-wing Israelis …

What Barack Hussein Obama told Muslims in Egypt (text here)  —  President Barack Hussein Obama, born to a Muslim father and educated in a Muslim country, won a rousing response in Cairo today with an outreach to a Muslim world that reviled his predecessor George W. Bush.

A Meeting in Damascus  —  About an hour after Barack Obama's excellent Cairo speech, I met with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, at his office here to talk about the speech and the Israel-Palestine conflict.  We spoke for several hours and I will have a fuller accounting of our conversation in my print column next week.

Awful  —  What an awful speech.  Among the problems, one was the president's claim that there are “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.”  The true number is probably less than half that, as this page details.  —  Even when Obama was trying to be nice to Israel …