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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Without making a judgment on these policies one way or another, it's nearly incontrovertible that the U.S. government displays far more support for the Israeli government than for its Palestinian counterparts. The United States was widely blamed in the Arab world for the harsh sanctions on Iraq that contributed to a humanitarian crisis there, and it is seen as hypocritical for preaching democracy while supporting autocratic and corrupt regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
It's also quite clear the U.S. doesn't respect the way Muslim nations run their affairs (many undemocratically and with a dubious regard for human rights). There are also the stories of Muslim or "enemy combatants" from the war in Afghanistan held contrary to international law in Guantánamo Bay. Post-9/11 immigration law revisions have meant that visa applications for young men from Arab and Muslim countries have been slowed down so much that not one of the 32 recipients of the 2002 Fulbright Scholarships from Arab countries received approval to enter the United States before their fall semesters began.
Some of the reasons for such rampant hatred of the U.S. aren't fair -- 61 percent deny that Arabs had anything to do with 9/11, Gallup says. But the overwhelming reason for America's tarnished image in this world is because of our foreign policy. And efforts to spin that, thus far, have only been met with skepticism and hostility.
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Asked at a Feb. 27 hearing about the need for the United States to do a better job explaining its foreign policies, the then-undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, pointed to research indicating that foreign affairs was merely the No. 9 priority of "thousands of people in the Middle East and Southeast Asia," behind "my family, my children's right to thrive, the opportunity to practice my faith." Thus, Beers said, with limited funds and, hopefully, embassies already explaining U.S. foreign policy, she chose to focus her attention on "mutual understanding" and "the things that unite us."
Beers -- the former chairwoman of two of the nation's top advertising agencies, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather -- had had no previous experience in public diplomacy. When he announced the Texan's official nomination for the post in October 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Beers "got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice. So there is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something."
Beers' grand vision was the Shared Values Initiative. The $15 million ad campaign began appearing on Oct. 28, 2002 -- during Ramadan, when TV viewership its at its highest in that area of the world -- in Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Pakistan. But the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to air the ads, and they stopped running in December after only approximately $7.5 million had been spent.
To many, the ads seemed quaintly from another era, relics of a different propaganda campaign: that of the Cold War. Back then, the American way of life -- not just democracy and freedom but also capitalism and its resulting consumerism -- were the chief selling points against communist Russia and its conquered satellites.
Our way of life is seen in a more complicated context in today's Muslim world. As Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, told a Senate hearing in February, "the Muslim publics continue to mostly shun our pop culture" in regions where there is conflict. "But even when America's products are well-received, there's a view in the Muslim world -- and there's a view all around the world -- that there's too much America in the lives and cultures of Europe and the entire globe." Or, as John "Rick" MacArthur, publisher of Harper's magazine and the author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says, Shiite Muslims in the region "aren't interested in promoting Western values or Western ideas of democracy; it's anathema to them. These are not feminists."
That of course complicates the mission of anyone trying to "sell" brand America. Beers' Shared Values ads tried to counter the impression that America is hostile to Islam, while also selling the U.S. as "a land of opportunity, of equality," as Hammuda says in one vignette. "We are happy to live here as Muslims and preserve our faith." But Jean AbiNader of the Arab-American Institute, who sneeringly refers to the ads as "the happy Muslim tapes," says that they "missed the point -- that's not why the United States is resented." The reasons, he surmises, have more to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the violations of human rights by the Arab and Muslim governments that the U.S. supports.
In January, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the ad campaign had been pulled because it was failing. The Journal quoted Youssef Ibrahim, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as calling the effort "extremely poor" and comparing the ads to government commercials "showing happy blacks in America" during the 1930s. (State Department spokesman Richard Boucher claimed that the campaign was stopped because officials "generally felt that we have had the impact on the people we wanted to talk to.")
