"If the emergence of home-grown Muslim terrorism has been bad enough, the failure of Barack Obama to engineer the transformation some expected from him in the wider world has been no less dispiriting. After the toxic impact of George Bush on Muslim opinion, many hoped that the advent of a kinder, gentler president whose middle name was Hussein would help America to draw the poison. Mr Obama himself seemed to think that this might be possible. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told the New York Times earlier this year that Mr Obama counted his Cairo speech to the Muslim world of June 2009 as one of the three most important things he had done to combat terrorism."

Read it at The Economist

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