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Babylon & Beyond

EGYPT: Obama and the Middle East

By Jeffrey FleishmanStaff Writer 
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Despising America has long been a Middle East pastime, but then the country that brought war to Iraq and orange-suited prisoners to Guantanamo Bay elected a Facebook-friendly president who speaks in poems.

What’s a mullah to do?

With the speed of a Twitter missive, the cultural game has shifted. Barack Obama’s rise to the White House comes when the Arabs are intensely suspicious of U.S. intentions, and when Islam, through satellite TV and the Internet, is inundated with Western culture.

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Eight years of President Bush gave conservative Muslims a buttress against America. But Obama, who plays as well in Hollywood as he does in the villages of Kenya, is changing Washington’s image from a cowboy with snarling sound bites to a conciliator with star appeal.

Check out the rest of the story in today’s Los Angeles Times.

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Babylon & Beyond
Jeffrey Fleishman

Jeffrey Fleishman is a senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was the foreign and national editor. A 2002 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Fleishman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. A longtime foreign correspondent, he served as bureau chief for The Times in Cairo and Berlin, and was previously based in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also was a writer on film, art and culture. Fleishman has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and a finalist for the Center for Public Integrity’s Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. He is the author of five novels, including “Good Night, Forever” and “Last Dance.”

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