A Saudi court on Saturday convicted a female journalist for her involvement in a TV show, in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex, and sentenced her to 60 lashes.

Rozanna al-Yami is believed to be the first Saudi woman journalist to be given such a punishment. The charges against her included involvement in the preparation of the program and advertising the segment on the Internet.

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In his first formal interview since taking office, the president spoke with the Dubai-based station Al Arabiya on topics pertinent to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Much of the interview was spent defining the new approach that the United States would implement in that region: respectfulness over divisiveness, listening over dictating, engagement over militarism. But the president drew the line when it came to terrorist organizations.

“Their ideas are bankrupt,” he told host Hisham Melhem, when asked to respond to recent audio clips from al Qaeda leadership calling him various epithets. “There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.”

Pressed later in the interview to comment on Bush’s use of the term ‘War On Terror,’ and the implications that the phrase held, Obama once again distanced himself from his White House predecessor.

“I think that you’re making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the White House. “We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith’s name. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down. But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”

Woot.

But then, I’m on the disengage with the Middle east faction, so maybe I see things differently.

The sooner we get off oil the sooner we can leave the yahoos in Israel and in the Palestinian/Arab world to their own devices, free to blow each other to smithereens.