State Department public‑diplomacy effort targeting Arab youth post‑9/11

2] This duality—desperate need for love entwined with either willful ignorance or even nuanced hate—has underlain the Arab view of America for a generation, unchanged even by the collapse of the Twin Towers. But based on my recent trip across the region, a confluence—Arab Spring and the technology that empowered it—has provided the U.S. a new chance to push reset with a half-billion Arabs, as long as it can shout louder than increasingly sophisticated bunk merchants like El Aschkar. Ask about basic political facts—al Qaeda’s responsibility for 9/11, or the death of Osama bin Laden—and even the most educated will start popping off inanities. I’ve been dealing with this frustrating relationship for much of the past decade. Shortly after 9/11, in an effort to win Arab “hearts and minds” in the mold of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the State Department poured hundreds of millions into a new public- diplomacy initiative, overseen by former ad executive Charlotte Beers and then Bush communications czar Karen Hughes. In short order came Radio Sawa (“together’’), television’s Alhurra (“the free one’’) and Hi Magazine (named for the one English word the whole world knows), which, inspired by the post-9/11 call to service, I steered editorially in print and online in 2003 and 2004. Hi, sold on newsstands in 20 Arab countries, was charged with providing a window into, and dialogue with, the U.S. for Arabs between 18 and 35. To maximize the project’s efficacy, I conducted perhaps the most extensive qualitative study of Arab sentiment about America in the post-9/11 era. With two colleagues, I traveled across the Arab world—the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco—for two weeks on what we called a “listening research tour,” interviewing scores of young Arabs individually, in focus groups and at giant roundtables, using Hi as proxy for the region’s perpetual question: what do you think about the U.S.? While the HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025023