A President Barack Obama delivered a historic speech in Cairo, Egypt, greeting the VIP crowd with the traditional Islamic greeting Assalam Alaikum, referring to Islamic scripture as the *Holy* Quran and quoting that religious tome five times. He is the first U.S. president to do either of those things. I found the speech to be inspiring and politically risky, as American conservative extremists have embraced a culture of hatred toward not just Muslims but all people of Semitic heritage. The great majority of these extremists tend to hate Obama on spec, citing his liberalism and inexperience in what I perceive to be racial code. The Cairo speech is likely to only further enflame the hate fringe in the U.S., who consider all Muslims to be terrorists and all non-Jewish Semitic people to be Muslim (which is not true; Lebanon, for example, is a largely Christian nation). MSNBC's First Look listed a variety of reactions to the president's speech: