When President Obama appeared on the big-screen TVs at a Pizza Hut overlooking the Nile, the upscale dinnertime crowd shoved aside their slices to hear what he had to say about their revolution and subsequent developments in the Mideast.
By the time he was finished, the president had received a smattering of applause on his vision for a democratic Egypt; as well as a few hefty tips on how to proceed.
“It’s a good token,” said businessman Hany Naguib, 41, of Obama’s $2-billion financing proposal for Egyptian economic development. “I don’t think we should expect the U.S. or anyone to bail us out.”
At the same time, said Naguib, who owns a computer software company in Cairo, the borrowing and debt forgiveness package is merely a drop in the bucket, and only one factor in future relations between Egypt and the United States.
“There’s [still] a lot of distrust of the U.S. in Egypt by the regular person,” said Naguib, who was among the tens of thousands of Egyptians who stood in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, caught up in the fervor of the recent uprising. “There’s a lot of rhetoric. I’m not sure that this speech will make a difference.”
Reviews of Obama’s speech were similar at several dining spots around the capital Thursday night: hopeful yet wary.
At a cafe in the Nasser City neighborhood, waiter Ahmed Abdel Aziz, 26, remembered how encouraged Egyptians felt when they packed the place two years ago to watch coverage of Obama’s first major Mideast speech at Cairo University.
“People seem to have lost confidence in the good words Obama said when he was here,” said Aziz. “I think it was us Egyptians, Tunisians and Arabs who forced Obama to finally start reaching out to the region and support freedoms and peoples’ will. He knows that it is a reality now and that he will lose the whole region’s support if he doesn’t do so.”
Cafe patron Taha Murad, 40, an engineer, agreed that the “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt appeared to have shifted U.S. foreign policy in favor of pro-democracy movements in the region.
“America is finally aware of the fact that it has to support and sponsor democracies in the Middle East,” Murad said. “Now all we hope for is that America would keep on supporting our liberties and pressure Israel into recognizing a Palestinian nation.”
At another cafe, 20-year-old Omar Sabaa was scanning online analysis of Obama’s comments on the peace process on his laptop, conferring with other students about the president’s apparent support for a two-state solution based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
“The whole world should know this is the way forward,” said Sabaa, who is studying political science at the American University in Cairo.
But he said he and other students who joined the protests in Tahrir Square were also skeptical of Obama’s promises of economic aid.
“He put a good spin on it for the American public — that they’re investing in democracies,” Sabaa said. “It is encouraging. But the Arab world has heard a similar speech before.”
At the Pizza Hut, in the upscale Zamalek neighborhood, no one had glanced up when news anchors announced that Obama was about to speak. But as soon as the president appeared on screen, middle-aged businessmen turned their chairs to hear what he would say and younger women and families shifted tables to get a better view.
Someone asked the waiters to turn up the volume, and to switch one of the televisions to Al Jazeera Arabic. A manager of the eatery lingered to watch.
Naguib, who was just finishing dinner, said he appreciated what sounded like a broader, more nuanced foreign policy approach. When Obama mentioned the struggle of Naguib’s fellow Coptic Christians in Egypt for religious freedom, the businessman smiled and applauded.
However, he fears the revolution could be hijacked by religious extremists, a possibility Obama also alluded to, but did not offer much help addressing, he said.
Fady Magdy, 28, a project manager for Naguib’s company who watched the speech with him, worried that the aid package might be siphoned off by remnants of the government of ousted longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
“We have seen how this money is spent” under Mubarak, he said.
But Magdy was more hopeful than Naguib about the future, echoing Obama’s comments about the birth of a new democracy as the group paid their bill and prepared to leave.
“A lot of Egyptians, we didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t know what to dream,” he said. “Now we have something to hope for.”