Winning the Propaganda War

NY Sun ^ | Daniel Pipes

[ddtorquee]

It comes as a relief to learn that Karen Hughes, who runs the public diplomacy shop at the U.S. State Department, has suspended the pathetic effort to reach out to Arab and other foreign audiences via a taxpayer-funded magazine named Hi International (best remembered for a notorious June 2005 article, "Sharp-Dressed Men," that told how "real men moisturize").

It's startling to realize that $4.5 million a year produced a mere 55,000 monthly copies of Hi and (according to alexa.com) a website that ranks about 900,000th from the top, suggesting it gets about 100 hits a day. The magazine has been an embarrassment and a waste of money. (When did the war on terror become the war on wrinkles?)

But even had Hi been better conceived and executed, it – and to a lesser degree, such American government efforts as Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra Television – is misconceived. Like generals fighting the last war, diplomats recall the successes of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe in providing precious information to Soviet bloc peoples and thereby helping to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Doing what they know worked once, they largely adopted the same informational model for Hi, Sawa, and Al-Hurra.

But Muslims generally and Islamists specifically do not lack for reliable information; much less do they (as did Soviet-bloc populations) prefer Western sources of information to their own. To the contrary, many indications suggest Muslims favor tuning in or reading reports prepared by their co-religionists, trusting these more than what comes from non-Muslims.

The clearest proof comes from Muslims living in Western countries .. fluent in one or more Western languages. Enjoying access to a huge array of television stations and Internet sites, they generally get their news not from these but from Muslim sources.

[CHICAGOFARMER]

HERE IS PRESIDENT BUSH'S AMMO

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