Obama fan Camille Paglia looks at that Cairo speech, and is less impressed than she had hoped to be.

Thus:

Obama’s speech (which I read rather than heard) seemed to my teacher’s eye like a strong first draft rather than a polished final product…

The Cairo speech is well-organized, ticking off central thorny issues region by region. But there is an unsettling slackness and even sentimentality in its view of history.

Yes, Obama’s principal targeted audience was moderate Muslims, whom he attempted to woo away from extremism. But the president missed a huge opportunity to speak with equal force to doubters in his own nation, where suspicion of Muslims has sometimes turned ruthless and paranoid…

While there was a mini-list of Muslim ideas and inventions (including the questionable assertion that we owe our "mastery of pens and printing" to the Arabs), no comparable credit was given to the enormous Western contributions to science, medicine and technology.

But the gravest omission was that Obama failed to fully articulate the most basic Western concepts of legal process and civil liberties, which have inspired reformers around the world. The president of the U.S. should be an eloquent ambassador of those ideals wherever he goes.

Sure. If, that is, he believes in them and does not see them as a transient post-modern relativistic construct.

By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like "scholarships," "internships," and "online learning" — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism.

Spot-on. That paternalistic point in the speech struck me too. "Here you Muslims out there, needing the nice new friendly US of A to help you reform and learn to treat women nicely. We’re here to help! We even have projects! And we’ll pay!"

Camille concludes:

But before he can sway hearts and minds, the president will need to show that he understands the ultimate divergence and perhaps incompatibility of major creeds. At the finale, his recitation of soft-focus quotes from the Koran, Talmud and Bible came perilously close to a fuzzy New Age syncretism of "all religions are the same" — which they unequivocally are not.

The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing — which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days.

It’s not what you say. It’s what they hear.

Did the Muslim World hear "nice guy – but weak"?

What did the Christian World hear?

Nothing. It was dozing in the corner.