The prize-winning PR promotion Campaign Obama, launched in 2006/07, is still going great guns. Having conquered America in November, it’s now targeting the world – well, certainly the Muslim world for a start. Obama is perceptive enough to know why his country’s long-cherished dream of American hegemony turned into a nightmare: over one billion Muslims, or one-sixth of the planet’s population, have closed ranks to become an uncompromising foe on realizing that all America had to offer them was more hidden agendas cloaked in self-serving hypocritical rhetoric.

Strangely, Obama thinks he can bring about a collective change of Muslim heart by offering them more of the same.

Obama’s recent ‘Mission for Muslim Souls’ had to be launched for symbolic reasons from Arab soil, and so it was. His choice of Cairo prompted Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to comment that Egypt’s leader epitomized "the tyrannical and repressive regimes so often the primary recipients of massive US foreign aid for doing as they are told." [Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East, isn’t exactly the darling of the Muslim masses, least of all in Egypt itself.]

As for substance in Obama’s speech, Loewenstein felt there wasn’t any. The only thing it signified, she said, was that "the likelihood of a dramatic shift in United States’ policy toward Israel in the coming years is almost nil and that no threat to the status quo of the Bush-Clinton-Bush decades is waiting in the wings."

The most interesting ‘take’ on Obama’s war to win the hearts and minds of Muslims came from Alexander Cockburn. In his weekly column in CounterPunch magazine, the co-Editor noted the presidential attempt to rewrite history by suggesting that cordiality towards Islam was soundly embedded in America’s cultural history.Obama confided to his vast Muslim audience worldwide that the first Muslim Congressman had been sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy of the Koran. Obama didn’t think it important to name names, so Cockburn obliged with the identity and a lot more besides: it was Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat elected in 2006, and added that on Ellison’s victory night rally the local crowd had shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar!’. "During the race Ellison understandably downplayed past associations with the Nation of Islam."

The New York Times, having looked at Barak’s careful preparation for the speech, reported that Obama and senior administration officials had spent months soliciting opinions from a wide variety of experts, including several prominent Muslim business leaders. Obama had apparently tinkered with his speech until the last minute, even working on it on Air Force One, the paper claimed, "long after most of his advisers had fallen asleep".

Something more than Obama’s now famous word-magic was clearly necessary to ensure that illusion trumped reality in the Muslim world. That ‘something’ was a bold attempt at tinkering with historical truth. He claimed, for instance, that Morocco was the first nation to recognize the infant United States, and that the second US President, John Adams, in signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, wrote "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."

Cockburn’s dry comment: "It’s a stretch. As my father Claud said, ‘Never believe anything till it is officially denied.’ Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states." [America desperately needed free access to the Mediterranean, and the Barbary pirates controlled the sea lanes! Frank Lambert in The Barbary Wars said the pirates took to looting European vessels because European governments had barred the states of Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco from trading in their markets.]

It was about that time, wrote Cockburn, that an early version of the Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key, written in 1805, offered a view of Islam markedly different from Obama’s uplifting sentiments in Cairo. "America’s national anthem began as a gleeful tirade against the Mahommedans. In short, America’s march to Empire was minted in the crucible of anti-Islamic sentiment."

Besides tinkering with history in Cairo, Obama also tended toward obsequiousness; he credited Islam with the invention of printing and navigation which, Cockburn opined jestingly, "should surely require the Chinese People’s Republic to withdraw its ambassador in Washington DC in formal diplomatic protest."

The Cairo speech will, however, also be remembered for Obama’s historic public acknowledgment, however obliquely, of the long-known American-engineered bloody regime-change which overthrew Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953. Said Obama: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." [That’s the understatement of the New Millennium, surely?]

Columnist Chris Hedges oozed sarcasm as he asked, "Did they play Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by US iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world’s largest ghetto? What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture - yes, we still torture - only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel’s brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured?"

Added Hedges: "We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. Muslim rage is stoked because we station tens of thousands of American troops on Muslim soil, occupy two Muslim nations, make possible the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, support repressive Arab regimes and torture thousands of Muslims in offshore penal colonies where prisoners are stripped of their rights."

And in case the world had forgotten, Hedges prodded memory: "We now have 22 times as many military personnel in the Muslim world as were deployed during the Crusades in the 12th century."

The Bush White House openly tortured, noted Hedges, while the Obama White House tortures and pretends not to. "Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month’s issue of Harper’s magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation and force-feeding, continue to be used to break detainees. The President has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept. And the Obama administration has sought to obscure the fate and condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment."

Nothing has changed, and nothing will. Why?

Some say it’s because Obama favours half-measures, even when a crisis demands bold, decisive action. Others opine Barak talks like Obama but acts like his predecessor.