Obama's Honeymoon

...may be over sooner than he expects.

For now, Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East see two things in Obama: to them he's a walking, talking apology, and an infiltrator. He's an apology for the Bush years; America's gift basket to the rest of the world for the fault of protecting itself [....]

...there are two powerful opinion makers in the region that cannot afford to do away with the convenience of hating on America and its leaders, and those would be the ruling regimes and their most ferocious enemies, the jihadists. A popular Obama is dangerous since it deprives both camps of a distraction, a focus for white-hot rage; for the regimes, anti-Americanism, like anti-Zionism, is a most useful tool for deflating the wrath of the gathering mob, a mob whose numbers will swell as the world becomes poorer and resources turn scarcer, and oil profits are bled, while the jihadists need the seething anger to enlarge their recruitment pool. The faster that Obama can be turned into a hated figure, the quicker that matters revert to how things were. [emphasis added]