Tired of this substandard demographic argument

Submitted by Skeptical Elephant (United States), Jun 9, 2009 at 22:08

Why is the demographic miscalculation the biggest criticism of the speech? Why focus on this rather than the seven points of policy? There are many other things that are problematic with the address than the number of Muslims in the United States. If that's what we need to focus on, we missed the big picture and a decent platform to counter policies that are a threat to security. The Obama administration clearly wanted to influence the Lebanese and Iranian elections.

Secondly, he fulfilled a campaign promise. Of course he's going to say sweet things. He believes in neoliberal complex interdependence! Did we expect him to say, "Islam the root of all the problems in the world and I know for a fact that even though there's over a billion of you, you're all exactly the same"? We should be talking about policy. The disagreement in politics is always how to get from point A to point B. Out of the whole speech, the best criticism is "he messed up a number, therefore we can discredit everything he said." Let's talk about the ability for authoritative regimes to reform on their own without foreign pressure, let's talk about viability of a two-state solution, about whether or not the speech will have positive or negative effects.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".