This part has gotten some attention:
It is going to be a very difficult challenge. Al Qaeda is still bent on carrying out terrorist activity. It is-- al Qaeda is still bent on carrying out terrorist activity. It is, you know, don't fool yourselves because some people say, well, you know, if we changed our policies with respect to Israeli/Palestinian conflict or if we were more respectful towards the Muslim world, suddenly, these organizations would stop threatening us.
That's just not the case. It is true that we have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect and changing our language and changing our tone. It is true that we have to work very hard for Israeli/Palestinian peace.
But what is also true is that these organizations are willing to kill innocent people because of a twisted distorted ideology and we, as democracies and as people who value human life, can't allow those organizations to operate.
To the degree these assertions have any meaning at all, they are false. Bin Laden said that the al Qaeda targeted the US instead of Sweden because the US pursues negative policies in the region, that Sweden does not. These policies - the US intervention in Lebanon; US support and military presense in Saudi Arabia; US support for brutal dictatorships in Egypt and Jordan; the US sanctions, invasion and later occupation of Iraq and US direct support in all its forms for Israel are all reasonably tied to the US' goal of ensuring Israel's viability in the face of widely held regional opposition.
A public US commitment to a one state solution would turn the Middle East to a different, vastly less difficult, and better place by the standards of US interests and values tomorrow.
The same could be said for the US adopting Sweden's policy of relativly inactivity and/or neutrality, but that would not be necessary as the US could instead use far fewer resources than it is expending now to ensure and guarantee protection of individual Jewish rights and property in Israel while still ending its state of conflict with the region.
The idea that al Qaeda's views and activities have nothing at all to do with US policy is clearly and wildly false though. Al Qaeda would still be terrorist, but it wouldn't be targeting the US, which would make a big difference from a US point of view. The US is not spending hundreds of billions of dollars confronting Tamil terrorists, the PKK/Pejak or the MEK (I'm leaving the IDF aside for now, but it is far from unanimous in the region that the IDF is not a terrorist organization) not because those organizations do not have twisted ideologies, but because those organizations do not have direct disputes with US policies.
If Obama gave it a second's worth of thought, he'd abandon that claim.
