Muslims see shift in Obama speech, no breakthrough

CAIRO — From shopkeepers and students to radical groups such as Hamas, many Muslims praised President Barack Obama's address Thursday as a positive shift in U.S. attitude and tone. But hard-liners criticized it as style over substance and said it lacked concrete proposals to turn the words into action.

Obama touched on many themes Muslims wanted to hear in the highly anticipated speech broadcast live across much of the Middle East and elsewhere across the Muslim world. He insisted Palestinians must have a state and said continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank is not legitimate. He assured them the U.S. would pull all it troops out of Iraq by 2012 and promised no permanent U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

But at the top of his priorities, he put the battle against violent extremism. And he was faulted for not apologizing for U.S. wars in Muslim countries.

"Obama's speech is an attempt to mislead people and create more illusions to improve America's aggressive image in the Arab and Islamic world," said a joint statement by eight Damascus, Syria-based radical Palestinian factions, including Hamas.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said there was change in tone. But he complained that Obama did not specifically note the suffering in Gaza following the three-week Israeli incursion earlier this year.

"There is a change between the language of President Obama and previous speeches made by George Bush," he said. "So all we can say is that there is a difference in the statements, and the statements of today did not include a mechanism that can translate his wishes and views into actions," said Barhoum, whose group the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival, welcomed Obama's words.

"The part of Obama's speech regarding the Palestinian issue is an important step under new beginnings," his spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh said. "It shows there is a new and different American policy toward the Palestinian issue."

Arab satellite stations Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, as well as Egyptian, TV broadcast the speech live, with a voice-over Arabic translation.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah leaders said they didn't see the speech and could not comment. But the militant group's TV station Al-Manar broadcast it live, with an Arabic voice-over translation. Syrian state TV did not air the speech but the mobile text messaging service of the official Syrian news agency SANA sent four urgent headlines on it as Obama spoke.