U.S. Presidential Election 2008

[Deckard]

Originally Posted by cacophony

From the speech:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Interesting.

Agreed. It was a curious way to structure a sentence about the mistaken cause of the conflicts. (If he was going to say "instead of" then he should at least have moved the word "primarily" to the last half of the sentence, I'd have thought...) It didn't quite chime with the rest of his speech. I'm aware it sounds like we're giving him a free ride if we speculate about this being inserted as an unequivocal rebuttal to those who see him as Muslim or being soft on terror. I suspect his position is rather less stark and one-sided, but certainly I'll be paying extra attention to his views on this in the future, particularly in light of his comment a while back about bombing Pakistan.