On June 10, 2008 James Glassman was sworn in as under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the United States of America. Two weeks later, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal under the title: "How to win the war of Ideas" in which he discussed his understanding of the challenges ahead and his plan of action to meet those challenges. The following six paragraphs summarize what the article says.
[First, we need to get the goal straight…The aim must be to ensure that negative sentiments and day-to-day grievances toward the U.S. and its allies do not manifest themselves in violence]
[For starters, we should confront the ideology of violent extremism…The most credible voices here are those of Muslims themselves…who have publicly disavowed al Qaeda's methods…Our public diplomacy efforts should encourage Muslims…to spread the denunciations of violence…far and wide.]
[A second approach to the war of ideas may…be even more effective…The ideology that motivates al Qaeda and similar groups is based on the notion that believers have a duty to carry out the excommunication of unbelievers…This ideology posits a Manichean world, divided into two camps…This is a fantasy…Our vision is a pluralistic world…The task is not to persuade potential recruits to become like Americans…but to divert them from becoming terrorists.]
[We do that by helping to build networks…cultural, social, athletic and more: mothers against violence, video gamers, soccer enthusiasts, young entrepreneurs, Islamic democrats. For example, there is an emerging global network of families of Islamic victims of terrorist attacks…the war of ideas needs to adopt the…goal of diverting impressionable segments of the population from being recruited into violent extremism.]
[Where does Iran fit in? The pool of future suicide bombers and insurgents is sustained by people like the leadership of Iran…the approaches I have outlined…should appeal to a proud and sophisticated Iranian population that is open to pluralistic ideas.]
[What we seek is a world in which the use of violence to achieve political, religious or social objectives is no longer considered acceptable, efforts to radicalize and recruit new members are no longer successful, and the perpetrators of violent extremism are condemned and isolated.]
In reality the appointment of Glassman came amid a debate regarding America’s effort to win the hearts and minds of somebody whom the debaters are having difficulty identifying. Officials of the US government did start a television broadcast called "Al Hurrah" which means freedom in Arabic but it is difficult to tell what sort of freedom they are trying to preach given that the Arabs believe it is America that needs to be free of Jewish influence and Israeli domination.
In any case, before I jump into the debate and discuss Glasman’s article I want to give a historical perspective of the situation as I experienced it in the late Nineteen Fifties when I lived in that part of the World.
I was in my early teens and living outside of Egypt in 1956 when the country was invaded by Britain and France, an adventure embarked upon by the two colonial powers in an effort to retake the Suez Canal which was nationalized by the Egyptians following the refusal of the World Bank to finance the construction of the Aswan dam and power station.
The American President, Dwight Eisenhower who had liberated Europe a few years prior to that time, ordered the invaders to stop the aggression and get out of Egypt, and they did without much argument. The Egyptians were grateful and they regarded America highly despite the role that her Secretary of State had played to influence the ill-advised decision of the World Bank.
A year following that invasion, our family returned to Egypt where we settled after an absence that lasted a dozen years. Everything was new to me but I adapted quickly to the new environment. I also picked up a new hobby, that of listening to short wave radio. I listened to something like fifteen stations on a regular basis, some of which were well known such as the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, those of Israel and France et cetera. But the rest of the stations were pirate broadcasts emanating from places they never identified.
These were propaganda stations that incited the people of Egypt to rise up, rebel and overthrow their government. The BBC and radio Israel caught my attention because the first emulated the pirate chorus of inciters to a limited extent while the second joined the pirates as enthusiastically as anyone can be.
Let me give a piece of advice to anyone who plans to incite the Arabs on anything. If you want to make the Arabs love their leaders, start a pirate station and attack the leaders. There is nothing more childish, more cowardly and more disgusting in the estimation of the Arabs than to go into hiding and attack an Arab however bad you may think that person may be.
I listened to those stations not to learn what was wrong about Egypt or bad about President Nasser but to learn what was glorious about the country and noble about her President, my President. Of course, it also helped that the American Central Intelligence Agency tried to bribe President Nasser with 3 million dollars, a sum that was huge at the time.
Incorruptible as the man was, he took the money which was handed to him in a briefcase full of cash, told the World about it and used it to build the Cairo Tower in full view of the Hilton Hotel where the American tourists stayed. Nasser did this to show ordinary Americans how much their country had deteriorated and to tell them what their country can do with her bribes. Come to think of it, the tower has the look of a raised middle finger, so maybe the late President of Egypt was telling America you can take your money and shove it.
Now, dear reader, contrast the action of Nasser with what was going on in Israel at the time, what has been going on ever since and what is going on today in terms of the corruption that is more abundant in that nation than the grains of sand in all of the Middle Eastern deserts. I suppose this is the difference between the nobility of the Arabs and the baseness of the Israelis, a reality that the New York Times is frantically trying to project in reverse. Maybe there is something the New York Times forgot to shove.
The Voice of America caught my attention for a reason different from those of the BBC and radio Israel. That broadcast gave English lessons through a program whose title in Arabic translates into: "Learn English". This may sound tame in English but it sounds harsh in Arabic. Consequently, the announcer would once in a while explain the reason why the title had this imperative tone about it. He or she would say that English is so important a language that everyone must learn it.
I cannot tell how many people were impressed by this claim but I was not, having heard the same claim made by the French whose language I had mastered and the Arabs whose language I was in the process of mastering.
Fast forward to the present time. I never had the opportunity to watch the new television station "Al Hurrah" but nothing from what I learned as I listened to the Voice of America tells me Al Hurrah will impress the Arabs to any degree. Also, I spoke to people who traveled to the Middle East and watched the station there, I read about this American adventure and I watched sample clips of what it is doing. My conclusion is that the effort is likely to be a useless one and will probably lead to nothing worth mentioning.
I was beginning to put my finger on why this may be the outcome when Glassman’s article was published. And this piece served to reinforce the theory I was formulating which is that the mentality that tried to tell the Arabs at gunpoint how to govern themselves is now trying to tell them how to be free. It is doing it by telling them to submit to the slavery from which, in Arab and Muslim eyes, America is suffering as she has become a client state of Israel and the slavish follower of the Jewish lobby.
At first, it may be difficult to accept that a situation like this can be but it gets easier to see the reality of the thing when you consider the following. The one thing that shocks almost everyone on the planet about the Anglo-Saxon culture is that the servant will feel superior to everyone else and will act in a snooty supremacist fashion the more faithfully he submits to the whims of his master however capricious and demeaning those whims may be.
In fact, an Anglo-Saxon servant can psyche himself into believing that to bring someone under the dominance of his master is to liberate that someone. And what most Americans and most Canadians do not realize is that hidden in our culture is this English tendency. Furthermore, no matter what the ethnic background of the newcomers to this Continent, they pick up this trait without realizing it. After a while, we all adopt this shocking mentality and we don’t even know it.
And it is this mentality that is the source of America’s troubles today as America tries to drag the World under the influence and the dominance of America’s master, the World Jewish Congress.
And the discussion continues in part 2 of this series.