Egypt meets hope. We Americans can take pride in a new foreign policy vision that is truly democratic, historically informed, mindful of unintended consequences and less willing to suffer the explicit abridgment of human rights in the name of our own, narrow national interests.
“There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom,” the President quotes Martin Luther King to remind us how today’s Egyptians’ struggles are so like our own. And the soul rejoices, too, in the measured, grown-up, forward looking response of our grown-up, measured President. He offers nothing less than a new hope that the events of the past weeks suggest that America’s conflict with the Muslim world has been the historical abberation, and not a cultural or historical inevitability. And he inspires the hope that Americans may yet come to better understand our most basic commonality not just with the Egyptians of Tahrir Square, but with the common peoples of the whole world: our common yearning to be free.
A brilliant speech, well worth watching in full:
Inspirations and Aspirations 