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Two Speeches, Two Presidents?

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
June 02, 2011

Yoav Fromer goes back two years ago, to President Obama’s famed speech in Cairo, and then fast-forwards to his State Department speech last month, and finds today in Tablet Magazine a fundamental, irreconcilable contradiction: The multiculturalist relativism of the former speech simply cannot jibe with the insistence on the universal superiority of Western ideals, such as democracy and individual liberty, of the latter. When push comes to shove, which speech will guide Obama in the Middle East?

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.