For reactions to US President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world yesterday, we start with The New York Times. This is very much a pro-Obama paper of course, and the tone of its main article on the speech was that it was surprisingly blunt towards Israel and used very direct language, leaving Palestinians jubilant…

Another pan-Arab paper, Al Hayat, conducted an online poll. Out of five options to rate the speech, (with number one being the best) the biggest score, 34 percent, chose the second: it represents a significant change in US attitudes towards Islam, but not cause for outright jubiliation.

In Israel, reactions are mixed. The more right-wing Jerusalem Post divides the speech up into “the good, the bad, and the omitted”. On the good side: Obama’s strong words against holocaust denial and anti-Semitism in a city where those very things are rife. On the bad: the Jerusalem Post is offended by Obama’s implicit comparison of the holocaust to Palestinian suffering…since the Jews were completely innocent in the holocaust, whereas, says the Post, a cogent argument could be made to say the Palestinians share some of the blame for their plight.  Worst of all though for the Post is the omission: Obama didn’t mention what this paper considers to be the Jews’ historical and religious right to be in this part of the world. For the Jerusalem Post, that omission brings the whole justification for Israel’s existence down to the horror of the holocaust, which reinforces hardline Palestinians’ argument that their people are simply paying the price for Europeans’ crimes.

But elsewhere, such criticisms are dismissed. Ha’aretz, traditionally a more left-leaning paper, says Obama undeniably emerged as a true friend of Israel.

The reaction, globally, is positive. And the speech is certainly seen as significant; front page news in most places, as in Italy with La Stampa… but further down that very same front page, the paper reports rather less love-thy-neighbour remarks by Silvio Berlusconi who was caught complaining that “Milan seems like an African city” because there are “too many” immigrants. The right-leaning La Stampa doesn’t really pick up on this statement, which would be a resigning matter in some countries, as anything out of the ordinary. The truth is that these kinds of statements probably play well with Italy’s electorate on the eve of the European Elections.

The prediction is that racist or xenophobic parties are likely to do well in these elections, and in the Netherlands they already have, according to exit polls. As De Volkskrant reports, the PVV, Geert Wilders anti-Islam Freedom party, has come second in the race, going from nought to four European Parliament seats.

The British also voted in European parliament elections on Thursday but the media there have respected the injunction to wait until the rest of the continent has voted, Sunday, before publishing any preliminary results. In any case the British media are far too preoccupied with what is happening in domestic politics – the resignation of another minister James Purnell, means thigns really look bad for Gordon Brown – The Guardian calls him “the smooth assassin” – the Tory Daily Telegraph says “Purnell knifes Brown” and calls the outgoing Work and Pensions Secretary a “baby-faced assassin”…