Thomas Friedman's "Show Me the Money"

Thomas Friedman's column discusses the election of Barack Obama and the impact it will have on Middle East relations. Here's one very telling quote from the article:

“If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you,” remarked Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “How are you going to implore crowds to chant ‘Death to Barack Hussein Obama’? That sounds more like the chant of the oppressor, not the victim. Obama just doesn’t fit the radical Islamist narrative of a racist, blood-thirsty America, which is bent on oppressing Muslims worldwide. There’s a cognitive dissonance. It’s like Hollywood casting Sidney Poitier to play Charles Manson. It just doesn’t fit.”

For now, I can see how his election does not fit into the hard-line Islamic point of view. But what happens if Obama has to take military action on a Middle East country? Is he still "different" than George Bush and Cheney to this group? Or is he just another "imperialist American" bent on destroying Islam? Despite his Muslim name, I am betting on the latter. Although I am a liberal, I do not underestimate the threats of right-wing Islamic terrorists like Osama Bin Laden. And it is all too easy for them to paint any American president, black or white, as a threat to the good religion of Islam because it serves their cause. It's much easy to raise the passions of your people when your group is on God's side, while the other group are evil.