Winning over the Muslim mind

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Derk Kinnane

FACTS ARE stubborn things. And the facts, sad but stubborn, are that hatred of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world is greater today than ever before; that it shows no sign of diminishing; and that Washington's efforts to counter it have had little success.

Its most visible (and audible) efforts have been the public diplomacy of radio and television stations. None are winning hearts and minds to any great extent. Al-Iraqiya, the television station the Pentagon ran in Baghdad, was supposed to entice Iraqis away from the popular Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya--both of which are sympathetic to Islamic extremism. But an Iraqi media specialist was quoted in the Washington Post on January 8, 2004, describing it as technically backward, unconvincing in its message, and unable to compete with other stations.

A new American effort is Al-Hurra, meaning "The Free One", a satellite television station being set up in Springfield, Virginia, that will beam news and entertainment in Arabic to the countries reached by Al-Jazeera. Al-Hurra boasts that it is committed to being fair and balanced in what it broadcasts. Its staff of 200 is also to be largely Arab.

Al-Hurra, the biggest government-financed media venture since the Voice of America was set up in 1942, is not alone in targeting the Middle East. The United States already has two radio stations, Radio Farda ("Radio Tomorrow"), which broadcasts in Persian, and the Arabic-language Radio Sawa ("Radio Together"). Both carry news and a mix of Western and Middle Eastern pop music directed at an audience of young Iranians and Arabs.

Yet these various stations have little influence on either governments or the "Arab Street." Why? Ali Abunimah is vice-president of the Arab-American Action Network (a body that supports the Palestinian cause.) In August 2002, shortly after Radio Sawa began broadcasting, he presented a comparison on the website Electronic Intifada of bulletins put out the same day by the BBC and Sawa:

   In the evening the BBC and Sawa both reported
   on the visit to the region of the UN Special
   Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs, Catherine
   Pertini. While the BBC quoted Pertini as
   expressing deep concern about the grave situation,
   Sawa quoted her only as describing
   announced Israeli measures to relieve the
   plight of the besieged population as encouraging.
   The BBC highlighted a new report from
   the World Bank that put the number of
   Palestinians living in extreme poverty at over
   50 percent. Sawa said nothing about that but
   repeatedly included an upbeat item about a
   planned meeting between Israel's defense minister
   and the new Palestinian interior minister.

It is not difficult to guess which news service Arabs find more credible.

That is not to deny that Sawa has won success of a kind. It has developed an audience of 15 million in the region. But Salameh Nematt, Al-Hayat's current Washington bureau chief, puts down Sawa's appeal to what he calls cultural schizophrenia, an appetite for American pop culture that is not infrequently coupled with rejection of U.S. policies in the Middle East.

"People think highly of America in the sense that it's superior when it comes to everything they enjoy", he said. "Everyone likes Michael Jackson and Jennifer Lopez, but they hate George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice." Hansjoerg Biener, a German specialist in international broadcasting, points out similarly that listeners in Jordan in the 1990s tuned into the Israeli station, Kol Israel, because they liked its program formats even though they disliked its views. So, despite the 15 million who like its pop music, there is little reason to think that Radio Sawa achieves what it was set up to do: influence Arabs to view the United States in a better light.

Senior U.S. officials are not unaware of these difficulties. Last October, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented to journalists on the failure of public diplomacy directed at the Muslim world. Ideas, he noted, need to be marshaled and communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners. "In many instances, we're not the best messengers", he admitted.

RECOGNITION of this prompted Congress to tell the State Department to come up with proposals to remedy the failures. Last October, a team brought together by the State Department issued a report advocating a new strategic direction in U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world. It was to be implemented by a reorganization of interagency activities, better use of the Internet, more support for the teaching of English, more staff with better knowledge of Arabic and other regional languages as well as of Muslim societies, and, yes, a big increase in funding. Yet even if these recommendations are implemented, they too will probably not have the desired effect. The reactions of Arab commentators to the report explain why.

Ali Fayad runs a Beirut-based think-tank dealing with relations between the Islamic world and the West. He found an assumption throughout the report that the problem is diplomatic rather than political. The report fails to acknowledge the fact that U.S. policies are the primary reason for Arab discontent. Abd al-Mahdi Abdallah, a Jordanian expert on Arab politics, has gone into more detail. At the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, he listed a number of things that foster Arab anti-Americanism: military intervention and sanctions against Arab countries; U.S. military bases in the Arab world; support for authoritarian Arab regimes; policies seen as hostile to Islam and to Arab and Muslim U.S. citizens; American hypocrisy on democracy and human rights in the Arab world; above all, U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians.