Word: arabize
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...could not have been better timed to detonate like a fireball in the hearts of millions. Now bin Laden was cannily, politically using the mass media for a spin strike aimed at the world's billion Muslims. On Tuesday, his lieutenant Sleiman Abou-Gheith followed with an appeal to Arab unity and the promise of a further "storm of airplanes" against America...
...Institute. It is a war fought in news studios in Qatar and with editorials, sermons and press conferences. It is a war that the U.S. needs to fight not only to stanch the supply of extremists willing to die to murder Americans but also to shore up nervous moderate Arab allies, who fear their people may turn on them for supporting the bombing of Muslims...
...problem is not so much the U.S. message--that our war is not with Islam, that many countries lost citizens in the attacks, and so on--as the fact that it is not reaching Arabs. Too few U.S. representatives in the Middle East speak Arabic. Too few U.S. officials show up on the dominant Arab TV-news network. The U.S. has invested too little in cultural exchange. The overall failing is perhaps simply that the government has no coordinated communications--oh, let's say it, propaganda--strategy. Asks Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee...
...Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs if she considers herself a "communications czar," and she laughs, "I hope not." Less than a month on the job, Beers has ideas for making the American case--increasing cultural-exchange programs, lining up officials to appear on Arab media and perhaps getting agencies to develop pro-American ads for Arab TV. But she has few tools at her disposal. The government's biggest broadcast arm, Voice of America, has a mandate of objectivity--employees detest the term propaganda--and while it broadcasts into Afghanistan in several regional languages...
Today, even among many educated, Westernized Arabs who admire American pop culture, "America is seen as the evil behind all the problems in the Middle East," says Abdul Rahman al Rashed, editor of the influential Saudi-owned newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. Many instinctively mistrust the U.S. and refuse to believe an Arab could have carried out the attacks, in part because, they claim, the U.S. has failed to bring proof against bin Laden to the Arab media. This absence creates fertile ground for his views, even among those who would not endorse his acts. "I found bin Laden strangely...