The American right scorned Barack Obama’s speech today, saying he had apologised for past American actions while failing to hold Arab and Islamic countries accountable for the words and actions of violent extremists.
US conservatives lashed out at the president for opening with a Muslim greeting in Arabic, for omitting to mention what they described as American successes in Iraq, and for exaggerating the number of Muslims living in the US.
While Republican party leaders were largely silent Thursday morning, conservative commentators and former Republican aides caricatured Obama as weak and insufficiently strident in his support for Israel.
“President Bush would never have criticised our military or our intelligence community on foreign soil,” a former Bush speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, said on Fox News. “He basically threw our military under the bus in front of a Muslim audience.”