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home > by publication type > transcripts > What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs, and Political Concerns
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| Chair: | James J. Zogby, president, Arab American Institute |
|---|---|
| Speaker: | Christopher W.S. Ross, special coordinator for Public Diplomacy, U.S. Department of State |
| Moderator: | Barbara Slavin, senior diplomatic correspondent, USA Today |
December 2, 2002
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
Barbara Slavin [BS]: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations this evening. We have what I hope will be a very interesting panel. They’re here to discuss findings of a survey of the Arab work to try to get a better understanding of what they think about the United States, what they think about themselves, what’s important to them and to see whether our public diplomacy efforts since September 11th are having any impact and how perhaps we should adjust those efforts to be more successful.
And we are very fortunate to have with us Dr. Jim Zogby, who I’m sure you all know. He’s founder and president of the Arab American Institute. He’s been one of the most outspoken people in this country trying to explain Arabs to the rest of America and America to the Arabs. He has a call-in television program on Abu Dhabi TV, in addition to all his other work with the Arab American Institute. He will talk about the survey, which was done by his brother’s organize, Zogby Associates. Unfortunately, John Zogby could not be with us this evening to discuss the findings.
And on my right is Ambassador Chris Ross, who has had an illustrious career. I don’t know if I should call him an Arabist. Maybe that’s a little bit of a slur these days, but I certainly don’t consider it one. He’s been our ambassador to Syria, to Algeria. He was a spokesman in the embassy during the height of the Lebanese civil war back in the middle of the seventies. He certainly knows what it’s like to be an American in a difficult situation, an embattled situation. And he’s ben called back to help the State Department present the U.S. case to the world in the aftermath of September 11th. So, let’s begin with Jim Zogby.
Jim Zogby [JZ]: The book “What Arabs Think” was actually a labor of love for my brother and I. It involved about eight months of work in the region, and came about as a result of a very interesting conversation that I’d had shortly after September 11th when I was in Saudi Arabia speaking with an Arab writer. We were discussing the public diplomacy campaign that America was launching in the Middle East. And his response was, “You know, we ought to do that, as well. We ought to be telling Americans who we are and what our values are.” And then he paused for a moment and he looked off into the distance and he said “But the problem is what would we say about ourselves? What do we think, what are our values, what image would we project?” Reflecting on it a little bit further, he noted that actually for every Arab you’d sit and talk to, you’d get a different impression.
Well, that’s true about America, as well. The fact is that if you ask ten Americans on the street what does it mean to be an American, you’d probably get ten different answers. But in a country like ours, where we have a democratic discourse and where we do public opinion polling; and when we’re asked questions about what do Americans think about capital punishment or what do Americans think about this or that issue of public diplomacy or public policy, you can get an answer and an answer usually based in percentages: 48 percent think this and 22 percent think that, and so you can shape an impression of what Americans are thinking about on a variety of issues.
Public opinion polling is new in the Arab world. In fact, in many parts of the world it hasn’t been done at all. We’ve been polling for about the last three years in the region and we focused largely on media, what people are watching, not watching. We focused on some commercial issues, what they’re buying and not buying. And then at one point, we began to poll on their attitudes toward the external world, basically what they thought of America. And that was published here in the early part of 2002. We called it “Impressions of America.” We were trying to answer the question what do Arabs think about America? And the answers were quite fascinating because we found that they didn’t hate our values, Arabs didn’t hate our democracy and freedom, they actually didn’t hate our movies and television or education. Actually, when we compared the attitudes in the Arabs that we polled with the attitudes of the French, Arabs liked us a whole lot better than the French did. (Laughter)
The interesting thing was that Arabs liked all of these manifestations of America. What they didn’t like was American policy, and they overwhelmingly didn’t like that policy. And they actually didn’t like that policy in grades. They actually liked our policy toward Kosovo more than they liked our policy toward Kuwait and they liked our policy toward Kuwait more than they liked our policy toward Iraq and Palestine, which they liked the least of all.
We actually found the poll to be quite interesting in that its results answer the question that people were asking shortly after the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11th, which is why do they hate us? The answer was it’s our policy. And it was our policy toward them that caused them to react negatively towards us. But this poll was different. This poll tried to answer questions what do Arabs think about themselves? How do they identify themselves? What are their values and what are their beliefs?
And so we went into the field in eight countries, actually seven Arab countries, and we also polled the Arabs in Israel. We wanted to answer the question what are Arabs like? What kind of people are there and what are their values We actually went into the field in thoise countries interviewing 3,800 adults, split between men and women. They were randomly selected in each of the countries. They were face to face interviews. And the demographics which we looked at when we were finished, while largely urban because it was easier to poll in urban areas, although in Lebanon and Jordan we were able to go out behind the cities, but when you’re polling in Saudi Arabia, it’s easier to focus on ten different cities. The demographics though largely corresponded with the demographics of the countries in question.
What did we learn? We learned that there was diversity of opinion. We learned that there were attitudes that Arabs had were not dissimilar to attitudes of people all over the world. When asked the question what matters most in life, Arabs identified largely personal concerns. Like people all over the world, Arabs focused largely on personal security, economic security, fulfillment and satisfaction. When we said what affected them most, they said the quality of their work, the security of their job, their religion and their family, their ability to lead meaningful and productive lives and to provide for themselves and their families and to protect and to project the values that matter most to them. That’s what was most important. Foreign policy was down on the bottom, not unlike, if you would, a poll in America, where foreign policy is the least most important issue in people’s lives.
The most important is personal and family. When we asked them to choose from a dozen values, the values that they wanted to project most to their children, again they focused on personal and family concerns; health and hygiene, self-respect, personal responsibility, respect for elders, working to achieve a better life. Those were the things that they said were the most important.
Now, interestingly enough, we found that tolerance for the views of others and thinking creatively and having an imagination, they were down at the bottom of the list. We asked the same questions of Americans, and tolerance toward the views of others and creativity and imagination were at the bottom of the list. So, it wasn’t any different. Actually, the basket of values that Arabs wanted to teach their children and the basket of values that Americans wanted to teach their children were largely the same with one major exception - religion. Religion was high on the Arab list and on the American list it was, again, down toward the very bottom.
All this translates into politics. When we asked them to rank priority political issues, what are the most important political concerns, they gave us again largely personal issues, but with a twist. Civil and personal rights were number one, and number two was my economic situation, my personal economic situation. Number four was moral standards and number five I think was health care. What was interesting, though, was that Palestine was number three. Now, how does that compute? We asked further and we found that while foreign policy was at the bottom, Palestine was number three because Palestine wasn’t viewed as a foreign policy issue. It wasn’t viewed as something happening to other people. They actually viewed it as a personal question and actually saw what was happening to Palestinians as something that was happening to people very much like them. I use the analogy at one point, wanting to be as respectful as I can be toward the differences of course that exist between the Holocaust and what happens to Palestinians, but not unlike American Jews saw the Holocaust, as a personal issue for them, something happening to people very much like them, defining them. It was happening to people like them, it could be happening to me. Arabs view Palestine as a symbol, almost an expression about their daily lives; their powerlessness, their hopelessness, their sense that the world is out of control and affecting people very myc like themselves. And so, again, it was a personal issue.
When we asked questions about identity, no real surprises. Arabs, when given five or six different options on personal identity, identity themselves as Arab. Interesting in that in traditional society, the personal identifications are usually familial or tribal or regional, the only place where regional identification was high was Kuwait. It was about 20 percent. Interestingly enough, in Lebanon the most important identifier was not religion or Arab, but it was being Lebanese. And that was true across the board, Christian and Muslim. And in Egypt, the most important identifier wasn’t being Egyptian. It was being Arab. But in Morocco, the most important identifier wasn’t being Moroccan. It was Islam. The only country, in fact, where religion was the most important identifier, not Arab, was Morocco; the only country where country was the important identifier, not Arab, was in Lebanon.
When we asked how satisfied they were, how economically satisfied they were, economic satisfaction across the board - except for Lebanon, where the numbers were worrisomely bad - actually, if I were the head of state, I’d not think about running for re-election, because the numbers were quite bad when we put it in a comparison of…We asked a question, actually the way you ask it in America, are you better off than you were four years ago? And almost four to one Lebanese say no. Very, very low numbers; whereas in Morocco, partly because the change in government, numbers were very high. In Jordan, the numbers were also very high, although the expectation level in Jordan was not so high. The numbers were really quite fascinating.
One last point. We asked again questions about the rest of the world. We asked 13 countries and we asked people to gauge them favorably or unfavorably. America came out very badly. Actually, net negative numbers in every country. Israel, of course, came out horrifically; single digits in every country except even among the Arabs in Israel, only 16 percent had a favorable view of their own country. UK came out also badly, net negatives in every one. The most popular country, favored in all eight Arab countries that we polled, was France. And after that was Canada. I actually got so many calls from Canadian reporters the day after the poll came out because they said at least one place in the world people know Canada is not the United States, (Laughter) and judge us accordingly. And Germany also did well. Interestingly enough, Iran did well in Kuwait and well among Saudis, which is something I think would be not expected necessarily.
The one final point I’d make is that we did cross tabs, and in the cross tabs you learn an awful lot. We learned, for example, that Saudi young people are more optimistic than Saudi old people; more economically satisfied than Saudi old people. We learned that Saudi men are actually more inclined toward respecting the rights of women than women were interested in promoting the rights of women, but I’ll leave that to the question and answer, and just tell you we learned an awful lot. And it’s a very rich minefield out there…a field rather to be mined (Laughter) of valuable ...
BS: Wonderful Freudian slip.
JZ:…of valuable data to be explored. It’s a world that is just opening up to public opinion polling, and I think that there’s a great deal to be learned now and in the future. Thank you.
BS: Thank you very much, and I’ll turn to Ambassador Ross for your impressions.
Christopher Ross [CR]: Well, the work that Jim’s brother, John, and others in the field are doing has been very important to those of us who work in the field of public diplomacy. Market research or audience research, as we used to call it in USIA, forms one of the many talents or skills that Charlotte Beers has tried to introduce into our government; market research, message development, message testing, evaluation. These are the things that she has tried to bring in, contrary to what most of the press has said that she is trying to sell Uncle Sam the way she sold Uncle Ben’s. That is not the case.
Polling is very important to this work. Polling research, focus groups. Some of it we do inside government through I&R, in particular, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. Some of it we do impressionistically through our embassy reporting, which can sometimes be very profound. And much of it we derive from the work of the major poling organizations which, as Jim has suggested, have taken a renewed interest in the Middle East, be it Gallop, Roper, Zogby, et cetera.
Jim has described what the major finding as regards the United States has been. The major finding is that in the Arab world, there’s great hostility towards our policies and a certain admiration and respect for the American people and many of the manifestations of that people. This is a bit simplistic in its division because, after all, our policies derive from the American people and from their elected representatives. But let’s put that aside.
After September 11th, we came face to face with a situation of tremendous antipathy, at least as portrayed in the media, dancing in the streets after the events in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. Immediately, we turned to looking at what we should do. And we did this against a certain backdrop. The backdrop was first a tremendous decline in the resources available to public diplomacy in the roughly ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the events of September 11th. Depending on what figures you used, resources dropped 30 to 40 percent in that period. This had tremendous impact on programs, on staffing and on such basic things as training.
A second factor that we had to take into account that we confronted as we tried to come to grips with the situation as we saw it was the structural implications of the consolidation of USIA into the State Department, which had still not been fully worked out. But on the positive side, we found a tremendous renewed interest in public diplomacy and in what it could do. This was evident in the Congress, in the media, in the non-governmental organizations, indeed within government itself.
So, in looking at what we wanted to do, first of all there was a very basic function that tends to get forgotten which is an integral part of public diplomacy, and that is to report to policy makers what is out there? What are the opinions? What are the trends? There is a very well-developed system in the government for surveying foreign media, summarizing it, analyzing it, reporting it to decision makers. This is a very important function but it is one of many inputs into the foreign policy process. It is certainly not the only one. Our friends abroad tend to forget that there are other considerations that come into play as we create policy beyond how that policy is viewed abroad. So, you have reporting to policy makers, which continued and which has been tightened up.
But beyond this, the public diplomacy family, motivated by the Secretary of State, led by the Under Secretary, embarked on a two-pronged approach to the attitudes that we discerned in the Arab world and in the wider Muslim world. Here it’s important to state an objective. What was our objective? It’s loosely said in the media that there is a battle of hearts and minds to be won. I think that’s a very unrealistic objective to set. Hearts and minds respond to many things, but they respond most directly to the feelings and the attitudes that develop as a result of actions and not of words. To expect public diplomacy to eradicate all hostility to actions and policies is not realistic. Actions and policies derive from national interest. They may very frequently differ. Differences endure. A more realistic objective for public diplomacy is to create a situation of dialogue, to create a situation of engagement and to attempt to work toward a situation where there can be a disagreement without violence.
So, within this framework, in the short term our major task was to explain policy, to present and explain policy. And a great deal of effort went into this in the period after September 11th. We mobilized an unprecedented number of public officials here in Washington and abroad for interviews, for backgrounders, for video conferences across great distances, on television, radio, in the press. We covered virtually all the Arab satellite stations, not as is sometimes perceived Al-Jazeera alone. We activated a number of Web sites, which are important for two purposes: first, because of direct access that comes to these Web sites from various parts of the world; but secondly, as a means of distribution for our own embassies. The Web is how our embassies receive statements from Washington, download them, adapt them to local circumstances and get them around. Quite independently, we had radio Sawa. I say independently because the Board of Broadcasting Governors is an autonomous organization, quite rightly proud of its independence from the State Department. But in this period after September 11th, it did mount a major new approach toward broadcasting to the Arab world.
As you can tell from this rapid survey of what we were doing in the short term, the media play a very important role, and one of the things we’re going to be doing shortly to narrow the distance between the Arab media and ourselves is to create an outreach unit created for reasons of neutrality and ease of transportation and a number of other factors in London. There it will be able to interact directly with the headquarters of the major Pan Arab newspapers, which are both in London, with major bureaus from all the Arab satellite stations so we will be able to travel to various parts of the Arab world and the Muslim world to develop a much better relationship with the media.
In the long term, another of the prongs of our approach, we focused on three areas. The first is what we call shared values. As Jim suggested, polling in the Arab world and in the United States demonstrates that there are a number of values that are shared. These are not always recognized as being shared, but they are. Among the values that we find are a devotion to faith, a love of family, a commitment to education and the practice of charity. Building on these, we tried to generate a sense of some common ground despite all the policy differences, some common humanity and a certain sense of a common destiny. The concrete example right now is an initiative that we are loosely calling Muslim life in America, which is a multimedia presentation of a cross section of Muslim experience in the United States through video clips, radio spots, print materials, a pamphlet, speakers, et cetera, as a demonstration that thanks to the religious tolerance that exists in this country, Muslims enjoy the benefits of American society. You’ve undoubtedly read a great deal about this campaign. There is the positive and there is the negative. We can get into that later.
A second theme that we have been hitting in our long-term work is good governance, in which several bureaus of the State Department and several agencies of government are increasingly involved. A third theme is education, where again a number of bureaus and agencies are beginning up programs in support of education. In all of this, we’re looking to address a younger, broader audience. The ten years of drought and public diplomacy led us to focus on elites. We now want to address a younger audience, a mass audience, in addition to elites. We want to do this as much as possible in the languages of the people we are addressing. For this purpose, for instance, we are about to launch an Arabic language magazine after a hiatus of many years; a magazine whose target audience is quite deliberately the 18 to 30 year olds.
We are also interested—this will maybe make you laugh—in listening, not only in talking. We have come to realize in approaching the Arab audience that we are to have a true dialogue, we have not only to talk but we have to listen. And there is a concerted effort under way to build into various events and programs an opportunity where American officials can listen as they go around the world, as they receive foreign delegations here in the United States.
We’re also emphasizing a collaboration with the private sector as a way of increasing the resources available, recognizing the importance of the private sector in the American presence abroad. It’s not easy exploring this terrain because every time we make a move the lawyers come and tell us you can’t do that.
Finally, we’re putting a great emphasis on English teaching, on American studies, believing that English is a door into a better future in employment. We do have problems; one of them is a continuing lack of resources despite the incremental increases that have been granted over the past few years. A second one is a great dearth of language specialists. The ten years of drought meant that recruitment was curtailed, that language studies suffered. I retired three years ago. I was brought back one year ago largely because I spoke Arabic, and this is an indicator of the importance of the alumni in the current situation. But the fact is that we must do a much better job of training in the languages of interest to us. As we looked for people to appear on interviews to explain policy, we looked for Arabic speakers, Dari speakers, Pashdu speakers, et cetera, there was a handful of people qualified well enough in these languages to appear on television. And that is rather shocking.
A third problem, and here I will stop, is we haven’t quite figured out about what to do about television. Television is the hot new medium in the Middle East. There is no doubt that most people in the Middle East today derive their daily news from one form or another of television, be it satellite or earth stations. There are a number of proposals afoot. One of them is to create a U.S. government-owned Arabic language satellite station for the Middle East. Another is to mount a private sector initiative, privately funded, privately managed to do somewhat the same thing. A third is to concentrate on the exiting channels and to make available to the existing channels the best in American programming from whatever source it may come. So, I stop there and I turn the floor back over to our moderator.
BS: Thank you for being pretty good about timing. I’ve been told by Judith Kipper that I am not allowed to ask the first question, so I am going to sneak one in later on. I think there’s plenty to discuss here and I will welcome questions from the floor. If you could wait for the microphone and identify yourself, please.
JM: Jim Moody(?), Morgan Stanley. You said, Mr. Zogby, that there were 3800 respondents across eight different jurisdictions?
JZ: Yes.
JM: Which doesn’t leave that many per jurisdiction in terms of statistical significance and degrees of freedom and your confidence intervals and so forth, speaking technically. How much confidence can you have in those sub-global, those regional results? And my second question, if I can ask in the same time ...
JZ: We only reported on the country totals. We did not do an aggregate, and you ask how confident I am?
JM: Right. Specifically, when you divide by eight ...
JZ: Plus or minus four. That’s about what it is, because they broke out to about 600 or so in each of the countries and some were a little more and some were a little less. Some of the countries are so small, Lebanon for example, UAE for example, Kuwait for example, that the numbers can actually be very small. With regard to the cross tabs, the only cross tabulations that we actually used were those that could be statistically meaningful. For example, although we were able to see a trend line for Christians in Egypt, 10 percent of the total is not enough to work with. But young and old, male and female, yes, we were able to get something from that, and those were the cross tabs that we worked with. And there again the margin of error allows us I think to get some meaningful measures.
JM: My other question was the following. When you polled about the opinions about the United States, could you desegregate their feeling about our policies towards Israel specifically, or the Middle East conflict, versus other things about America? Was that dragging the total down a little bit or was that not distinguishable?
JZ: We actually asked the question in so many different ways that we learned a great deal. For example, I was struck initially by the one poll that came out very early on that gave a very unfavorable number to America and that was all the rage for a whole. And I said at the time that asking the question in the Middle East, “How do you feel about America?”, is like asking a woman who just kicked her husband out because she was a serial cheater what does she think of men? You’re going to get a bad answer. But if you ask the question what do you think about fathers or what do you think about brothers or sons, you might get something different. So instead of asking what do you think about America, we asked a range of questions about American life. That gave us one set of answers; the policy and the way we segmented the policy questions out with different policies gave us yet other information.
We then asked, as a push pollster might ask, “if America were to” questions about the Arab-Israeli conflict, about Iraq and about the Arab world in general and, of course, we got different answers. If America were to unilaterally invade Iraq, the already bad numbers go through the floor. But if America were to press Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and create a Palestinian state, the numbers go very high. Finally, we asked an open-ended question: what should America do to improve its relations with the Arab world? And the final chapter in the book actually is the response to those open-ended questions, which interestingly enough focus a lot on the Arab-Israeli conflict but also on the lack of Arab-American values to America policy. America should treat us better. America should treat Arabs with more respect. It should pay attention to our concerns. Those kinds of things. And so we aggregated all that together, country by country, and do a profile of what 600-700 Egyptians say about that. So, yeah, I think in answer to your question, we learned a lot about the way you can see attitudes towards America affected by policy and then affected, if you will, by policy change that can improve those attitudes.
ED: Elizabeth Drew, journalist. Mr. Zogby, did you ask about attitudes towards I guess we’d call it militant Islamism and, if you didn’t, what impressions did you get? How wide is the base of support for that?
JZ: We did not ask that question. We asked about the role of religion in life, we asked about it as an identifier, as a value. It came very high, not as high as some would expect both as an identifier and as a value. It differed from country to country. In Lebanon it was very low. In Morocco it was very high. It was the highest. But we didn’t ask a specific question about a trend in Islam. We asked about religion and its role in life, generally.
ED: Why didn’t you?
JZ: Why didn’t we? That actually wasn’t the purpose of this particular poll. Now, can we do it in follow up? Sure, we can, and we’re now developing actually the next round of questions that we’ll ask. About attitudes towards what you call militant Islam? No, I didn’t get an impression about that. I can speak anecdotally, but that wouldn’t be helpful for this discussion. And, again, just on that. You’d have to ask the question in so many different ways in each country. I think you’d ask a different question in Lebanon and you’d get a different set of answers. You’d get a very different kind of answer and in Saudi Arabia. So the question that makes sense here, you couldn’t ask about militant Islam. I think you would have to define it and define it in a different way for each country ...
BS: You could have asked about Al-Qaeda.
JZ: We could have asked about Al-Qaeda, but Gallup already did that, and we weren’t repeating their work.
MB: Hi. Mercedes Bishop, the World Bank. I have a couple of questions. First of all, I am wondering what the U.S. government is doing here in the States to help increase our understanding of our Arab colleagues. And second, in terms of this PR campaign, I still find lacking what our connection is to our policies. As Mr. Zogby found in the polls that the main disconnect is concerning the policies. And my concern here is that through the PR campaign, we’re not acknowledging this issue that will always be there, regardless of how well run this campaign issue is. So, if you could respond to that, as well. Thank you.
CR: There is an element of public diplomacy that is indeed focused on increasing American understanding of the world around us, and that is about one half of our extensive exchange program. The Fulbright program, as you know, for instance, works in two directions. Foreign candidates come here and Americans go abroad under that program. And that, by the legislation, is quite specifically meant to increase American understanding of the outside world. In the realm of information, it is not really the job of the U.S. government to tell the story of other countries in the United States. Our media are open to anyone who has something pertinent to say, and in many discussions that I have had with friends in the region, I’ve pointed out that the opportunity is there and that the opportunity is not well used. So, I think for the long term we do have programs in place to help Americans understand the outside world. For the short term, it’s really up to the governments themselves and the people involved to present themselves on the American scene.
With regard to policy and the role of public relations, the media campaign that was undertaken under the rubric of Muslim life in America was quite deliberately not meant to tackle the hard issues. The hard issues are addressed every day by officials and spokesmen here in Washington and at our embassies throughout the region. The media campaign on Muslim life in America was a parallel attempt to identify and build upon shared values, common ground for the purpose of initiating and rekindling dialogue and engagement. So, the two are not mutually exclusive. The fact that we did the media campaign does not mean that we suddenly stopped doing policy advocacy. As I keep insisting, policy advocacy is our daily responsibility and it’s carried out here in Washington and out in the region by countless people.
JZ: The issue of policy here is critical. The situation is ugly out there, as ugly there as it probably is here. And from numbers we’re getting on the U.S. side, attitudes towards Arabs, the numbers are bad. And I can agree with Ambassador Ross completely that Arabs have not taken the advantage of the opportunity to do public diplomacy here, and actually when they have engaged in it, frequently they are answering questions that people aren’t asking and they’re not answering the questions that people are asking and it has been a disaster. But, let’s take a look at ourselves for a moment. We can project the programming but have to understand that our policy trunks the program. You can say Muslim life in America, but the headlines speak differently. You can talk about education, but when you look at the number of Arab students on visas who have been able to come here in the last year versus the year before, that trumps the program. And when you get 32 Fulbrights from just the Arab countries that you’ve lost because they can’t get visas, that trumps the program. And charity, we share the value. We put it this way: bad news becomes big news. Same here. You get a bad story and it dominates the headlines. It does in the Middle East, too, and the treatment of Muslim Americans, what the Justice Department has done on an average day does more to trump the program of projecting Muslim life in America than the whole program is ultimately worth. And once comment from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and John Ashcroft about Islam and its nature trumps even what the President says. We have to be careful I think that public diplomacy is a much larger venture than anything that can be done by a few individuals in the Department of State, committed as they are to projecting the image, because managing the image is a very difficult job when not all the fingers of government are cooperating on the same page.
BS: I would agree. If I could add to that the charge of hypocrisy, that we are preaching all these wonderful values in countries that are patently not democratic, that are authoritarian, where we are showing support for these governments. Again, I don’t know how you possibly manage to deal with that issue and to show that Americans truly believe in these values when these people do not live under systems that are anywhere close to ours, even with all the new restrictions we have been of 9/11.
CR: Just one point to pick up on some point that Jim mentioned - visas. I think you all know from what background the current approach to visa issuance has arisen. The fact that we instituted very broad procedures in a hurry for national security reasons does not alter the fact transaction there are nuances that have been recognized, that are gang examined. The Department of State has taken a very direct interest in the situation as it applies to individuals, particularly those individuals who are sponsored on programs coming here by the U.S. government. And what Jim as described as a contradiction between our outreach and our restrictiveness has been quite clearly recognized.
As regards the hypocrisy, clearly we have different national interests and they take us to different directions with individual countries at any given time. You cannot let one interest trump all the others all of the time. I think it would be fair to say in the short term the needs of the war against terrorism, the needs of disarming Iraq are going to be the major determinants of our policy toward any given country. In the longer term, I did parallel. We are committed to working for a more democratic region and this will play itself out in each country in accordance with they’re circumstances of that country. We are not going to go in to say “Tomorrow you will institute democracy.” That’s not a very productive approach. But there are building blocks to what we know as a democratic life; the rule of law, transparency and many other such elements that we can begin to work toward. And over the longer term, they will alter the landscape as newer generations arrive on the scene. Here, our international visitor programs are critical, many of them are focused on bringing groups of opinion leaders from the region to the United States to discuss the issues of civil society, the means of making progress. The last group we had here was a group of Arab women leaders who came to observe the last elections here. I think they and their successors in the coming generations are going to be a very powerful force in the Middle East.
HM: Hisham Melham. This is for Ambassador Ross. He is interested in listening to us. One question about Muslim life in the United States, the other question on the audience that you are trying to reach in the Arab world. Recently, the State Department invested millions of dollars to produce the television ads. They paid Arab television satellites, Muslim satellites to air them, which exposure to the charge they’re trying to purchase understanding. You are answering a question that has not been asked in the Arab world. Very few people in they’re Arab world could claim or level the charge against the United States for religious persecution. Nobody in his right mind would say there is religious persecution in the United States, given that Islam is still the fastest growing religion in this country until today, even after September 11th. You showed life for the Muslim community in the United States as ideal, as if they live in a Shangri-La, which is not really virtually reality, such as the Arabs have also this unrealistic view of the Muslim community being launched or being persecuted or being chased in the streets. Again, these are two opposing wrong perceptions. Why not invite people during Ramadan from Arab television, Muslim television, help them logistically and what not, to cover the life of the Muslim community in Ramadan, in the United States without your involvement. And if they have any sense of professionalism, they would have to report that these people are living quite well, not withstanding the individual incidents that many of them were subjected to last year. And, you know, while you may have the crazies on the religious right like Falwell and Robertson saying these nasty things about Islam, the Catholic church and other religious communities opposed them and criticized them and debunked them. So, why not pursue this kind of approach instead of wasting $15 million on these silly television spots that make people laugh at you in the Arab world?
Now, the other thing is the audience that you’re trying to reach. I grew up in Beirut. I was a teenager growing up in Beirut, and I loved American blues and I loved American jazz and I loved American Hollywood movies, and I hated U.S. policy in the Middle East as well as in Vietnam. So, when you financed the Radio Sawa, and you broadcast most of the time nice music, and the 20 something enjoy that music, but they’re not going to be lured by the new way of trying to broadcast the news to them in a way that’s different than the BBC or Monte Carlo or whatever. And I don’t think your problem is with the 20 something. If we put aside the fact that I don’t believe that attitudes towards the United States are going to change unless you change polices, but let’s put that aside and talk about perception. What you have, as American foreign policy, the problem that you have is with the Arab elite. It’s these people, the academics, the journalists, the people who are involved in shaping Arab public opinion, these are the guys who speak Arabic, and who appear in Al Jazeera, on NBC or ABC and Dubai television, and it’s that these guys that the people who don’t speak English who are sipping coffee in the narrow alley ways of Damascus and Cairo and Rabat, they listen to them when they pontificate about the United States. And most of the time, you and I know that most of what they say about the United States is downright wrong. But the problem is unless you engage this community of Arabs, that strata of Arabs who are shaping Arab public opinion, and here you have to challenge them and you have to engage them and you have to dialogue with them and you have to criticize them, but to engage them in a broad sense; unless you do that, your problem will remain with that group of people who are shaping public opinion and not the 20 something who listen only to music and do nothing else.
BS: And I want to add to that, whose idea was it to have these docudramas that we broadcast?
CR: Let me address several facets of this river question that…First of all, we haven’t forgotten the elites. As I mentioned earlier, we’re trying to reach out to younger and to broader audiences in addition to the elites. The elites are still very much on our minds. Second of all, Mr. Yushamed’s(?) idea about inviting television crews here to cover the United States perhaps with our help but not with our direction or guidance is such a good idea that it’s been done for many years and we are still doing it. There are TV crews here from a number of Arab and Muslim countries throughout the year filming various aspects of life. And indeed it is a formula that is a very credible formula because they go out and they film what is of interest to their viewers with no filters; and, in so doing I think contribute a great deal to our understanding.
With regard to Radio Sawa and to the media campaign, these are experiments. We’re trying to think out of the box, trying some new approaches. As the weeks and months go by, we will make the adjustments that seem appropriate. Radio Sawa is a work in progress. Those who are behind it have engaged from the beginning in a great deal of research. They are very cautious in their approach, and yet they know that Radio Sawa is meant in many respects to represent the United States in the Middle East. And precisely how that will work as the mix of music versus let us call it policy changes we will have to say. It’s not a fixed formula.
The same with the media campaign. The focus on this occasion was Muslim life in America as an illustration of religious tolerance. That theme was chosen many, many, many months ago when the charge was in the news that the United States was not combating terrorism but was indeed fighting Islam. One could have wished for a much shorter production span. It might have ...
(SIDE B)
CR: We’re still digesting the lessons of this campaign, and we shall see where we go.
MA: Thanks. I’m Counselor Mohammad Abou Daub(?) at the Embassy of Egypt. I would like very much to add on what Mr. Yushamed just mentioned. I think, Ambassador Ross, we’ve met at the time we were discussing the campaign at the State Department. And it just puzzles me. I just want to ask a straightforward question. Are you trying to address the problem of values that you have in the Middle East or the problem of policies? Because I don’t think you have a problem with values. In the Middle East, yes, this manifests itself in the rows of applicants for visas to immigrate or to study or to go and live in the United States, be it in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, even Baghdad or Rabat. But the problem is probably, or I think in my opinion it is a problem of policy. I don’t think that the average layman in the street would take your let’s say campaign for human rights or the rule of law in the same manner that you want it to be addressed like here in the states. While he is watching on TV what is going on in Palestine, how can you rationalize that to the average layman on the street? Thank you.
BS: And it’s back to policy over and over again.
CR: It does come back to policy. But what I hear stated or implied in many of the questions is that there is somehow a choice to be made between advocating policy and exculpating policy on the one hand and pursuing common ground on the basis of shared values on the other hand. These are not mutually exclusive options. You can do both, which is what we’re doing. And I repeat, every day in every Arab capital, somebody from the America Embassy is explaining American policy. We are not asleep, and I do wish that those who write on public diplomacy spend a little more time focusing on this very essential fact.
BS: I want to get in one more question because we’re practically at the end here.
?: I want to get back into the box. You’ve been thinking out of the box, I want to get back into the box. Some of us here suffered through the Kennedy Administration youth program. You may remember this. Bobby Kennedy went to Indonesia and found out that there were millions of young kids who didn’t know much about the United States, and that kicked it off. I spent two years trying to define it and three years in India trying to run it, and it was simply hopeless. So, I’m glad to hear that we haven’t totally decided to junk our other programs. And that’s what I want to talk about. Outreach to students, organizations like (Inaudible) Mideast just as an ad have taken up the Outreach responsibility from a diminished American mission abroad throughout the Arab world. And before 9/11, we found our student services budgets cut. You don’t make any money, you’re a non-profit, you want to do student services. In Egypt alone, we had 30,000 people calling us, coming in, maybe just wanting to talk about studying in the United States. We’ve had to cut this way, way back. It doesn’t make any sense. For a very little amount of money, you can get a hell a lot of return.
Now, the question of visas. We all know that this isn’t the atmosphere to mount a head on attack against the Justice Department’s concern about kids coming in from the Arab world. So, one thing that the department could do is try to get the university community to introduce early admissions. Let kids apply early enough, so if they know they’re going to be accepted, they can get through that six-month visa problem, their parents then can also adjust and we can get them here. Instead, you know, they’re going to other places.
CR: Just a couple of points in response. As I indicated, there’s a renewed interest in education, and one of the approaches that the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs is adopting is meant to foster linkages between institutions: a Middle Eastern university and an American university; a Middle Eastern school and an American school. There was a major conference held in Marrakesh earlier this year to explore the ways means of doing this and the response from the Arab ministers and other high officials who were in attendance was uniformly positive. This was the kind of relationship that they welcomed. And indeed in one Arab country that I won’t name, we’ve been approached to help it institute the teaching of English as the mandatory second language from the first grade on. So, there is a lot of cooperation possible in the educational and cultural sphere.
On visas, the idea you present is I think one that should be explored. There are a number of ways that we’re looking at to try and make it easier for the legitimate visa applicant to get a visa, bearing in mind that the needs of national security are going to be paramount.
BS: I’m going to have to draw this to a close, but Jim has been very patient and he wants the final word.
JZ: I just wanted to close with a couple of observations about the study. The first is that when the Arab Thought Foundation sponsored this, the focus of it was not so much here as it was in the Arab world. And I just came from Cairo a few weeks ago where it was released in the Arabic version, and everything that I would have hoped about the book, Yushamed, was there; folks looking through it to sort of catch their piece of the cross tab to see like where I as a young Egyptian stood vis a vis an older Egyptian. The notion of doing public opinion polling and what it creates in terms of an internal political and social discourse is invaluable. We have fun with the numbers here, they’re having fun with the numbers there. And I think that’s so important.
What do Arabs think? I remember there was an interview that Goldmeyer gave years ago. It infuriated me. She said “I feel so bad for them. We have art and music and have fun and all they do is hate us and make war.” At the end of the day, what we learned from the book is that that’s not true. What do Arabs think about? They go to bed at night thinking about their kids and they wake up in the morning thinking about their jobs. Like everybody else all over the world, Arabs have real lives and are real people and are diverse and complex. One. Two, the problem is when they think about us, they think negative thoughts because of the identification of us with policies that they feel hurt them. We need to recognize that. I think we do recognize it. What we do with it is something else, but it cannot be ignored. We ignore it at grave peril.
Finally, what do they watch? I always find that interesting when I hear this debate about Arab television. Every show that we would possibly want to send to them, they’re already watching. I get too many calls from the Arab world complaining about “Did you watch this show just now?” They’re watching it. Arab cable television has not just brought Al-Jezeera and NBC and Abu Dhabi. It’s brought Fox and MSNBC and Meet the Press. As arcane as those discussions may be and why people don’t really watch news television, they do watch them there and they rivet on them. The elites that we’re talking about are watching those shows and being bothered by them. But the most popular watched program in the Arab world? “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” And there is an object lesson in that about what people are watching. They’re watching entertainment shows, just like we do. They’re watching American movies translated into Arabic, they’re watching American game shows and they’re watching American life. They like it, they just don’t know why we don’t apply our values when it comes to them.
BS: I’m going to close with one thing from your report, which I thought was fascinating, which was “72 percent of men in Saudi Arabia want to see women’s standing improve in society.” I’ll just throw that out. So, the next time you read an article that says it’s the most backward place on the planet, this poll suggests otherwise, at least maybe for the future. Thank you.
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