For some strange reason I received an email from The White House, attaching a video of his speech. I guess it just shows how they are using the internet to their advantage:-

Hello -

As a Senior Advisor to the President, I’m here in Cairo, Egypt where I watched President Obama deliver an unprecedented speech calling for a new beginning for the United States and Muslim communities around the world.

We all know that there has been tension between the United States and some Muslim communities. But, as the President said this morning, if all sides face the sources of tension squarely and focus on mutual interests, we can find a new way forward.

The President outlined some big goals for this new beginning in his speech — including disrupting, dismantling, and defeating violent extremism. It was a historic speech, and since many Americans were asleep at the time it was given we wanted to make sure you had a chance to see it.

Majority-Muslim countries around the world are filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives, just as in America. Indeed, part of what makes America great is having nearly seven million Muslim Americans living here today and enriching our culture and communities.

We can extend that kind of relationship abroad. It won’t always be easy, but if we make an effort to bridge our differences rather than resigning ourselves to animosity, we can move toward a more peaceful world over time.

Thank you,
David Axelrod
Senior Advisor to the President

We learn of his early life in Hawaii, born to a white mother and a black father, an American and an African. His mother divorced his father when he was very young and later married Lolo Soetoro and they moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. At 10 she sent him back to the USA to live with his maternal grandparents. He doesn’t write much about his relationship with his mother but it is clear that she remained a strong influence in his life and is someone who he loves and respects hugely.

Mostly we read about the struggle he goes through to build up a workable image of his father, based on stories he grew up listening to from various family members and how he tried to rewrite these stories, “plugging up holes in the narrative, accommodating unwelcome details, projecting individual choices against the blind sweep of history, all in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand”.

I thought it was an extremely good book that allows the reader extraordinarily personal insight into the thoughts, history and voyage of discovery that makes up the man who currently resides at the White House. It is a fascinating story about his battle with finding inner peace, his dawning and powerful realisation of racism and finally being comfortable in his own skin and finding meaning for his life as a black American.

I thoroughly recommend it.