Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
August 2, 2005

The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.

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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:

1. "Here's what America can do to be loved by Muslims" by Craig Charney
Craig Charney, president of Charney Research, explains why one graying 60 year old with a pencil mustache Egyptian said, "I wish it would get back to what it was. I used to love America." He uses research to demonstrate that the United States really can change its image in the minds of Muslims worldwide.
(Source: Daily Star, July 25, 2005)

2. "Terror shifts Muslim views" by Dan Murphy
Dan Murphy, staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, explains what leads Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to begin by saying "I can never agree to the American occupation and the US ability to impose its will on the region" and conclude "But I can't support a resistance that commits so many crimes. Each seems as bad as the other."
(Source: The Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2005)

3. "Women politicians or pseudo men?" by Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian political activist based in London and the author of In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, worries that the issue of women's rights "[like] so many others, has become one of the Arab world versus the West." She challenges women not merely to emulate men, but to bring with them a new perspective that is so needed in today's world.
(Source: bitterlemons-international.org, July 28, 2005)

4. ~YOUTH VIEWS~ "Why U.S. Public Diplomacy Failed in the Arab World" by
Nancy El-Gindy
Nancy El-Gindy, a student at the American University in Cairo and a former participant in the Soliya Arab-American online dialogue program, evaluates post 9/11 US public diplomacy efforts in the Arab World and takes a stab at explaining where they went wrong.
(Source: CGNews-PiH, August 2, 2005)

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ARTICLE 1
Here's what America can do to be loved by Muslims
Craig Charney
(Source: Daily Star, July 25, 2005)

Picture this: eight angry Egyptian men in a Cairo focus group venting rage at all things American for an hour. Then a graying 60 year old with a pencil mustache sighed, saying: "I wish it would get back to what it was. I used to love America." His words pointed to something surprising we learned from 14 recent focus groups in Egypt, Morocco and Indonesia: many Muslims could change their minds about America.

The research showed that the United States can improve its image in the Muslim world, despite the widespread anti-Americanism there. Perceptions matter. Muslims do not hate Americans for "who we are" or "what we do;" they are angry at what they perceive the U.S. has done in Iraq, the war on terrorism, Palestine, and to Muslims in American. Moreover, they continue to admire the U.S. in the domains where their countries need help, but most are unaware of the large and growing U.S. aid programs in these areas.

Awareness is growing of the dangers posed to the U.S. by anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries. These feelings aid terrorist recruitment, diminish America's ability to promote reform in Muslim countries, and threaten U.S. business, troops and tourists. These concerns were underscored by the choice of Karen Hughes, one of U.S. President George W. Bush's closest associates, to head the State Department's public diplomacy efforts. The Muslim world may always hate and love America, but her appointment suggests Washington wants to swing the balance in its favor.

Our findings showed that the keys to a new U.S. dialogue with the Muslim world are a humbler tone, a focus on partnership with local initiatives, and a sustained effort with major resources. When Muslims knew of U.S. help on issues that matter to them, like tsunami relief in Indonesia or women's rights in Morocco, it made a real difference. So did facts on other U.S. aid programs. As they heard them, many agreed with the Moroccan man who declared: "If these things are true, we would be friends of the U.S.!"

It was no news that Egyptians, Moroccans and Indonesians are hostile to America and U.S. power. They associated the U.S. with "blood" and "domination," called it "ferocious" and "manipulative," and gave Bush uniformly bad marks. Anger spilled over from U.S. policy to American firms and citizens. Such perceptions were based on information about America chiefly drawn from highly critical television stations, such as Al-Jazeera, the largest Arabic-language satellite network.

Yet Muslims are still impressed by the U.S., even if grudgingly. An older Indonesian woman said: "We hate its arrogance, but like the positive aspects." These included America's economy, schools and legal institutions, areas where the groups most wanted help for their own countries, tempering their anger against America. They felt that, as a 20-something Jakarta woman put it: "Despite the drawbacks, we need America."

U.S. assistance, however, has become all but invisible to Muslim audiences. Older Cairo residents remembered bags of grain with the U.S. Agency for International Development handshake logo from their youth, but are unaware that lately America has provided low-pollution buses and family planning clinics. "Now we don't see any of this," said a 50-year-old woman with a headscarf. Egyptians put U.S. aid to Egypt over the last 10 years in the millions; they reacted with disbelief when told it was $7.3 billion.

But when Muslims learned of U.S. efforts to help them, the impact was positive. After the massive U.S. relief program for victims of the Asian tsunami, follow-up groups in Jakarta in January voiced appreciation and were less hostile to America than those a month before. Similarly, the U.S. has vigorously backed reform of the family code and increased women's political participation in Morocco, and women there were the only ones in the study who said that America's message was not force, but democracy. As information was provided about other aid programs in the groups, reactions were similar to that of the Egyptian woman who said: "If it's helping us, we'll thank them!"

Yet if America is to have a new conversation with the Islamic world, this depends not just on saying something new, but on how America says it. The groups rejected with scorn claims that the Bush administration was working for the good of the Islamic world by fighting terror and promoting democracy and reform. Defending U.S. military action and presenting America as a force driving change angered them. (A young Jakarta woman wrote on a mock postcard to the White House, "Dear President Bush: Please help us with our economy but let us run our country!") In contrast, a more modest U.S. perspective based on listening, backing Muslim initiatives for democracy and growth, and agreeing to disagree over the war on terrorism, won wide support.

The groups also showed that Muslims will listen to what America says about their own lands only if the U.S. can agree to disagree over contentious issues like Iraq or Afghanistan, which provoked rage that shut down the dialogue whenever they were mentioned. The fate of Iraq and Afghanistan will in any event chiefly depend on their own citizens' views, not external opinion. If the main U.S. interest in other Islamic countries, like Indonesia, Morocco, or Egypt, is helping them reform, it must tolerate disagreements over its more controversial policies elsewhere.

As an older Casablanca man in a suit put it: "We have to recognize, there are things we agree on and disagree on."

To reach Muslims, America should vigorously engage local and regional news media - including Al-Jazeera - and also purchase paid advertising. However, changing the current situation will require major efforts and resources for an extended period. America's image problem took years to develop and won't end quickly.

Of course, there are limits to even the best communications efforts. Attitudes will be influenced by events the U.S. cannot control, as the recent storm over the Koran desecration story showed. Yet while Muslims care about what happens elsewhere in the Islamic world, the focus groups also showed that America's relationship with the respondents' own countries matters just as much. A sea change in attitudes may be impossible, but we saw that real progress can be made in opening Muslim minds about the U.S.

The U.S. now has a window of opportunity to reach out to the Islamic world, thanks to a series of developments this year that have improved the atmosphere. These included the Iraqi elections, renewed hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace, Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, and the possibility of a multi-candidate presidential election in Egypt, as well as the tsunami relief campaign.

The challenge for the U.S. now is to reach people like the Egyptian woman who said: "America is like this great guy who every once in a while does something immature and you begin to hate him." She was mad when she said it. But she was smiling, too.

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* Craig Charney is president of Charney Research, a New York polling firm. His study of how America can respond to Muslim anti-Americanism, "A New Beginning: Strategies for a More Fruitful Dialogue with the Muslim World," was recently published by the Council on Foreign Relations. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Source: The Daily Star, July 25, 2005
Visit the Daily Star, www.dailystar.com.lb.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 2
Terror shifts Muslim views
Dan Murphy

CAIRO - When the American invasion of Iraq began, Adel al-Mashad and his activist comrades sprang into action.

The next day they helped organize an antiwar protest in Cairo that brought tens of thousands of Egyptians onto the streets; it evolved into the biggest public attack on President Hosni Mubarak's rule since he came to power in 1981.

Mr. Mashad says that protest, which tied the anger at the US invasion to the aspirations for democratic change at home, is one of his proudest moments.

But that was March 20, 2003. Today, the voices of Mashad and activists in other Arab capitals are largely mute when it comes to Iraq.

They still fervently oppose the US presence. But they are increasingly put off by the brutal tactics used by the insurgency against civilians. Similarly, many Muslims are angry over the tactics used by terrorists in the name of Islam.

Among the manifestations of this shift in public attitudes:
* On Sunday, about 1,000 Egyptians, mostly hotel workers, marched through Sharm el-Sheikh, where a weekend bombing killed scores of people, chanting: "There is no God but God; terrorism is the enemy of God."
* In Pakistan, an Islamist call for nationwide protests against a crackdown on militants fell flat Friday with rallies drawing just a few hundred people.
* A recent Pew poll showed a decline in public support for suicide bombings in Muslim countries (see chart).

Mashad says he's been appalled by recent incidents in Iraq, such as the suicide attacks that killed 25 children receiving candy from US soldiers two weeks ago, and more than 50 Iraqis in a separate incident near a Shiite mosque.

And with suicide attacks on civilians spreading to places like Egypt, with 88 killed in the country's worst terrorist attack Saturday, he and many others are asking how one can honorably oppose American foreign policy without lending support to brutal tactics.

"The people fighting in Iraq, we don't know them and it's hard to be comfortable with them,'' he says. "We want to support the Iraqi people, but the situation now is so complicated and confused, and there's so much that happens that simply can't be tolerated. You ask me who do we support, and the answer is: It's hard to say."

Recent weeks have seen an outpouring of concern and condemnation of the culture of suicide terror.

In a talk given in Los Angeles last Friday, Maher Hathout, a senior adviser to the US Muslim Public Affairs Council, an organization that opposed the US invasion of Iraq, condemned suicide bombings. He spoke of a "perversion" of Islam as having affected the men who attacked London. "Somehow, some person [made] them swallow the bait that transformed them into [being] willing to blow themselves up and take with them innocent lives that God created," he said. "So many hearts that were supposed to be opened are closed; so many minds that could have been guided by the light of Islam have been confused."

"Confusion" is now the operative word for millions of Arabs, alarmed by the daily suicide attacks on civilians in Iraq, Europe, and now Egypt.

That has left secular activists like Mr. Mashad, an electrical engineer with a small contracting business, and some Islamists in the position of condemning both the US and the tactics used against US and Iraqi soldiers. "These are the tactics of extremists who are against democracy,'' he says.

Still, many Arabs continue to make distinctions between "legitimate" resistance that targets American forces and the "illegitimate" resistance that has become common in Iraq.

"There are both resistance fighters and terrorists," says Mahmud Kaswani, who runs a small store in Damascus. "The resistance has a right to continue to fight. [But] the people who are killing civilians - they are the terrorists.... I am against anybody who kills civilians - even British or American civilians."

But there are those who see attacks on civilians as a necessary component of an asymmetric war. Ayman Samarra, who sells scarves and robes in Damascus, says he supports the expansion of terror tactics to places like London. Iraq "was a safe country and now ... it is turning into a civil war. This is what America did. Everybody is against the Arabs. The bombings in London - things like this have to happen because before the war in Iraq, there were hundreds of protests and nobody listened."

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, has repeatedly said killing civilians "contradicts religion and its laws." But he has tempered his criticism by saying the US and its allies bear some of the blame.

Mashad remembers thinking that a nationalist Iraqi resistance would quickly emerge after the US invasion, focused on getting America out of Iraq and creating a democracy. Just as his organization had organized material and political support for Palestinian groups fighting Israel, he envisioned similar efforts on behalf of the national Iraqi resistance.

Instead, he sees the insurgency in Iraq as mostly religious extremists and former supporters of Saddam Hussein who want to restore dictatorship to Iraq. Were that to happen, the interests of democracy in the region would be hurt as badly as it has been by, in his view, an illegal US invasion to impose its views on Arabs from the outside.

"I can never agree to the American occupation and the US ability to impose its will on the region," he says. "But I can't support a resistance that commits so many crimes. Each seems as bad as the other."

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* Rhonda Roumani in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report by Dan Murphy, staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2005
Visit the Christian Science Monitor at www.csmonitor.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright belongs to the Christian Science Monitor. To request permission to reprint, please contact Lawrenced@csps.com.

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ARTICLE 3
Women politicians or pseudo men?
Ghada Karmi

A friend of mine, an American woman very active in advocating for the Palestinian cause, met the late President Yasser Arafat not long before he was taken to Paris on his last journey.

Arafat was always very sympathetic toward women's causes. It is well known that no one representing women's rights organizations would ever leave a meeting with Abu Ammar empty handed. It was perhaps therefore especially poignant that before my friend left him, he confided in her his two greatest fears for the future should he die. One was what would happen to religious pluralism. The other was the issue of women's rights.

In the Arab world today, the issue of women's rights has become something of a political football. It is not just a matter of modernity versus traditionalism, or secular versus Islamist; the issue, as so many others, has become one of the Arab world versus the West.

This is extremely unfortunate. The issue of women's rights is one of equality, not emulation, whether emulation of the West or emulation of men. But perhaps it would be useful to look at the experience of our sisters in the West to see what could be used and what should be avoided.

Back in the 1960s, female politicians in the West were focused very much on women's rights. This is no longer the case. Instead, women politicians behave more and more like pseudo men. Two examples spring readily to mind. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher very ably beat men at their own game to become prime minister and earn the reputation as an Iron Lady. In the United States today, Hilary Clinton is the most prominent female politician, and one often spoken of as a potential future president. She has become so by playing a male game better than her male competitors.

But if women are to enter politics merely to do what men do, the question is, why bother? After all, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the course of history was charted by men playing men's games by men's rules. Men's tendency to resolve conflict with violence is what has led to the frequency of war, the building of many walls and the state of the world today.

There are many women in politics today. There are a fair number of women in Arab parliaments, the Palestinian Legislative Council a notable example. But the presence of women in the halls of power is not sufficient. That is mere tokenism. What matters is the effect of that presence.

I don't want to pay flippant lip service to feminism. When we talk about equality we must talk about equality of opportunity rather than equivalence. The real reason women should be engaged in politics at all levels is not to emulate men but to bring a unique feminine weltanschauung to bear on the decision-making process.

This has never been tried. The only example I can think of where exclusively female action led to political change comes from literature. In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women, exasperated by their men's unwillingness to resolve an age-old conflict, decided to withhold matrimonial privileges until the menfolk agreed to end their conflict. Not surprisingly, it worked.

Arab women are several steps behind their sisters in the West with regards to claiming their rights. Insofar as it forces Arab women to focus on the issue of what their rights are, this is not a bad thing. That loss of focus in the West has led to confusion. Equal rights mean being able to bring your own perspective to bear. It does not mean doing what men do, and how they do it.

And if ever there was a time when a new perspective and a new weltanshauung was needed in politics, whether in the Middle East or globally, it surely is now.

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* Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian political activist based in London and the author of In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story.
Source: Bitterlemons-international.org, July 28, 2005
Visit Bitterlemons at Bitterlemons-international.org.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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ARTICLE 4 - YOUTH VIEWS
Why U.S. Public Diplomacy Failed in the Arab World
Nancy El-Gindy

At the Foreign Press Center podium in Washington, three weeks after 9/11, stood Ms. Beers, chairman and CEO of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide and Ogilvy & Mather, one of the biggest public relations agency in the United States, and recently appointed Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, responding to a question about whether there will be a "poster child, man or woman" to represent America abroad. Interestingly enough, Ms. Beers exclaimed: "Well you know, in a way, our poster people are President Bush and Secretary Powell, whom I think are pretty inspiring symbols of the brand, the United States."

This unusual exchange was, perhaps not unexpectedly, mocked and ridiculed with questions such as: "Is it possible to sell Uncle Sam the way you sell Uncle Ben?"

Ms. Beers and Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, outlined their program at a press conference in 2001, concentrating on the Middle East.

The plan included schemes such as using charming and important American athletes, celebrities or singers to spread the message, direct interaction with Muslim journalists, interviews with Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld or then National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice on Al Jazeera, Middle East Broadcasting or Lebanese Broadcasting, and banner ads on websites designed to tease Arab net users into coming to view websites full of inspiring information on Muslim life in America.

Not only did they discuss the newly acquired marketing plan for project America, but also explained how they would defend American policies and values. The word "freedom," Beers stated, would be defined and communicated to the outside world better, in order for those who don't have it to understand what it represents in the "land of the free." In turn, Boucher stated that they were going to do all they could to stand up for and explain U.S policy, because they believed they were doing the right thing.

Though this plan seemed polished enough to put into action, the shine of the polish seemed to blind them to all its huge flaws. It was thus no surprise to anyone when the widely publicized effort was a tremendous flop, and Beers resigned "for health reasons" in March, 2003. Said one anonymous official, "Nothing she did worked."

According to research from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, Mr. Bush Jr., who Ms. Beers believed to be the perfect 'poster man' of the values of the United States to overseas audiences, had horrible ratings in the Muslim world. From Morocco to Pakistan, Bush received disapproval rates of 60 to 90 percent.

The problem with Beers' response was of course that it was "who I think" not "who the general foreign public thinks" represents the best of America. Clearly having Bush as the "poster man" of the United States in the Muslim world did not contribute to a positive outcome.

Rather than try to better understand the grievances of Arab people against various policies, Mr. Boucher also clearly stated that they would continue to embrace such policies even though it is these political actions that are at the heart of the growing gap between the West and the Muslim world.

Results from a poll conducted by the Arab American Institution found 75 to 86 percent of people all around the Arab world blamed American policy - not American values - for their attitudes toward the U.S. For the most part, Muslims around the world understand and respect American values.

The Beer/Boucher strategy of speaking about the 'war on terrorism' and convincing Muslims that U.S policies are justified faced insurmountable odds anyway, since recent polls have shown that Muslims do not trust the U.S and its war on terror, not to mention its unshakeable support for Israel's actions at the expense of the Palestinians.

All that aside, the program's most significant flaw was probably that the main components of their public diplomacy strategy were not aimed at the right audience. By using the internet, celebrities and singers, and Al Jazeera, they were not targeting the audience who they had the greatest interest in reaching.

There have been many studies on the background of terrorists. Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim's, who interviewed Islamic extremists' detainees after attacking the Egyptian Military Academy in 1974 concluded that they were all from the middle and lower classes.

Another study by Albert Hourani on the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1930's, also suggested that 'terrorists' or extremists usually emerge from the same social milieu.

Hence, using celebrities and the internet would not have been effective. Such programs will probably only exert influence over the minority upper educated class who, despite their opposition to U.S policies, are usually not involved in such radical activities.

If the U.S. intends to make another attempt at strengthening its public diplomacy efforts, possibly the best strategy would be to restructure the State Department's efforts so they reach the lower classes through the use of respected and trusted religious leaders and authority figures in small towns to spread moderate teachings of Islam and denounce the use of violence for political ends.

This technique will most likely be the best way to reach out to the people of the Middle East since a war on terrorism should be constructed to prevail over extremist ideologies that approve of violence for political purposes rather than simply celebrating American values and policies, as the former are already well-understood by Arab elites and the latter not always appreciated by Muslims of all classes in the Middle East.

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* Nancy El-Gindy is a student at the American University in Cairo and a former participant in the Soliya Arab-American online dialogue program.
Source: Written for Search for Common Ground - CGNews-PiH, August 2, 2005
Visit Search for Common Ground at www.sfcg.org.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity, brought to you by Search for Common Ground, seeks to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. This service is one outcome of a set of working meetings held in partnership with His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal in June 2003.

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Posted by Evelin at August 3, 2005 01:20 AM