Two years after US President Barack Obama called in a groundbreaking speech from Cairo for a “new beginning” in relations with the Muslim world, his popularity among Arabs has nosedived, a poll released Wednesday shows. An overwhelming majority of more than 4,000 people surveyed in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, told the Arab American Institute that they felt that Obama had not met the expectations he laid out in the June 2009 Cairo speech, the poll found.
Obama called in his Cairo speech for an end to the cycle of “suspicion and discord” between the United States and Muslim world, and outlined a new US blueprint for the Middle East, which included a Palestinian state and efforts to defuse a nuclear showdown with Iran.
