In 2009, Barack Obama kicked off his pro-Muslim Brotherhood agenda with a speech at al-Azhar University in Cairo. More than five years later, that country’s Muslim president Gen. Abdel Fatah el-Sisi spoke at that University and in many ways attempted to undo the damage. The irony is that the Muslim President of Egypt sounded far less like a Muslim fundamentalist than the President of the United States did, speaking at the same exact University.

If you had to name a university in the world that is ground zero for Islamic fundamentalist teaching, Al-Azhar University in Egypt would certainly qualify. Regardless of one’s views on Islam, Egyptian President Gen. Abdel Fatah el-Sisi demonstrated a tremendous amount of guts when he spoke in front of the University’s top Islamic scholars recently.

El-Sisi challenged the very core beliefs of those scholars when he implied it was a ridiculous notion that 1.6 billion Muslims should murder 5.4 billion non-Muslims. While el-Sisi drew a line of distinction between religion and ideology when it comes to Islam, his speech was a diplomatic assault on Muslim fundamentalism from the heart of his country’s source of such thinking.

Not far from Egypt sits another President – in Turkey – who must have gone through the roof when he learned of this speech, via MEMRI:

In June of 2009, Obama delivered his now infamous speech at al-Azhar. It has largely been credited as the opening salvo in effort to bring about the Arab Spring, the bitter fruits of which el-Sisi has been dealing with: