On Easter and Passover, President Barack Obama extended well wishes to Christian and Jews.
Now he is doing the same to the Muslim world — partly in Arabic — and his message goes way beyond a politically correct greeting.
Highlighting Obama's escalating outreach to people of Islamic faith, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Obama extended them a happy Ramadan via a White House video blog.
It may be the first time that a U.S. president has gone to such great lengths to recognize the month-long fasting period of the Muslim world and shows the administration's strategy to get closer to the Arab mind.
Excerpts from the Chronicle:
"This message was part of a larger push, a point made clear in the introduction to the Ramadan video by Rashad Hussein, a deputy associate counsel in the White House who was the first Muslim in Obama's administration.
"This month is also a time of renewal and this marks the first Ramadan since the President outlined his vision for a new beginning between America and the Muslim world," Hussein wrote. "The President's message is part of an ongoing dialogue with Muslim communities that began on inauguration day and has continued with his statement on Nowruz, during trips to Ankara and Cairo, and with interviews with media outlets such as Al Arabiya and Dawn TV."
The Chronicle added:
"Like his Cairo speech, Obama's Ramadan greeting was sprinkled with Arabic words and references that were meant both to resonate with the Islamic world — by signaling that Obama knows something about its traditions — and to educate non-Muslims, said Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Reaction in the Middle Eastern press was muted, perhaps because the video was released late in the day across most of that region. Al-Arabiya ran a fairly straightforward recap of the speech, while the Israeli newspaper Haaretz zeroed in on Obama's expression of "unyielding" support for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.
"As has become its practice, the White House immediately released versions of the video with a set of captioned versions and transcripts that would do Babel well — from Arabic to Persian to Urdu — and sent it out over Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks."
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