PBC Interview: James Zogby on What the Arab World Is Saying to Us and Why It Matters

For years we’ve been sending our young men and women to fight and die there, but what do Americans really know about the Arab world? Not nearly enough, says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute and author of Arab Voices, an important new book that describes in finer detail than ever before what the region’s 350 million people really think about their lives, their countries, and the West.

What we think we know about Arabs–they’re are all the same; they’re angry; they hate the West etc.–is mostly wrong, a collection of myths uncorrected by schooling and  amplified by the media culture; myths, crucially, that politicians exploit to pursue policies in the region (cf. the Iraq war) that work against our national interests.

In Arab Voices, Zogby (whose brother is the pollster John Zogby) brings to life the results of a comprehensive poll of thousands of people in eight key Arab countries; many readers will be surprised by the picture that emerges (Arabs like American people (59% favorable rating), values (52%) and products (69%); their favorite TV shows are “movies” and “soap operas” — “religious programs” barely register.)

As Zobgy told me when we spoke recently by phone, his hope is that, armed with this truer, clearer, picture of the Arab world, we might approach a policy toward the region that’s based on reality and not on dangerous myths. Highlights below.

Read an excerpt of Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters by James Zogby.

[Buy Arab Voices: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell's]

Interview with James Zogby, author of Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters.

You’ve been working on these issues–American perceptions of the Arab world and vice versa–for many years. Why a book, and why now?

It’s been gestating for many years. I started working on the concept of the book during the Bush administration, when I saw the gap between our country and the Arab world continue to grow and policies being pursued that only exacerbated the situation. Then, when President Obama was elected, there was the hope that the gaps would close and that we’d begin to address them. What I began to see was that a knowledge gap, and to some degree a partisan gap, inhibited that effort.

Obama famously went to Cairo and addressed the Arab world in a very conciliatory speech? Didn’t that help?

That speech is in fact a roadmap for change. After it, I was invited on shows to debate conservatives and I was asked whether Obama would succeed in winning over the Arab world. I said he’d be more successful winning over people in the Arab world than he would American conservatives, who are accusing him of betraying our values and apologizing for America. And that made it clear to me that these issues still needed to be addressed in a way that tried to put it all together, talked about how we got where we are, and how we’re just not moving fast enough to move ourselves out of the hole that we’re in.

Give an example of the “knowledge gap” you’re talking about.

Nothing else brought it into such sharp focus as the lead-up to the Iraq war. The ignorance factor was so great that it was exploited by the administration, and because of that they were able to sell it to us that it would be over in six days, a couple of months and we’d be out of there; Bill Kristol saying there’s no such thing as a Sunni-Shia rivalry; Fred Barnes saying winning the war would be the hard part, setting up a democracy in Iraq would be the easy part; the notion that we’d be received as liberators. We went into a country to conquer it and occupy it, and we didn’t know a thing about its history or culture. Still two-thirds of Americans don’t know where Iraq is.

In the book you say that the news media is a big part of the problem.

I get called on to do shows when there’s a civil liberties problem or hate crimes, and they want to hear how the little dark guys feel. But when it comes time to do analysis about a foreign policy issue, they go either to the same crowd that got us into this problem to begin with, or their regular cast of characters that have no business talking about, say, Iraq. Whatever made Bill Bennett an expert on Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian problem, our relations with the Islamic world?

How do you account for that kind of absurdity?

The media culture reinforces the conventional wisdom, serves as an echo chamber for what the political culture is projecting rather than a critical voice about it, because their rolodexes aren’t fat enough; they don’t deal with regional experts. And because of that the public is denied an education–the education they didn’t get in grade and high school and college. The ignorance that’s exploited by the political culture and reinforced by the media culture.

So, instead of knowledge we have what you call “super myths” about the Arab world. What’s an example of a super myth?

The only story Americans get about the Middle East is the angry story. We have this image that Arabs go to bed at night hating America, hating Israel, get up in the morning hating America and Israel, and during the daylight hours they’re watching Al Jazeera, fueling their anger. The reality is they go to bed at night worried about their kids’ education and they wake up in the morning thinking about their jobs. The top concerns of people across the Arab world are health care, education, and jobs, and when they watch television they watch soap operas and movies.

But there is quite a bit of anger toward America, isn’t there?

Are they angry about our policies in the Middle East? Yes, they are. But are they angry at us? No, they’re not. They actually like the American people, they love our values. If anything, it’s that they think we don’t apply our values to them. As one of the people quoted in my book says, they feel like jilted lovers. They want to love us, they’ve grown fond of our culture, they want a piece of globalization; but they feel that we consistently reject them.

In the final section of the book, you outline a number of things individual citizens can do to close the knowledge gap. What are some of those things?

There are things people can do in their communities. There are World Affairs Councils everywhere, there’s the Great Decisions program. Because your son or daughter or nephew or niece may end up fighting a war in the Middle East, you have a responsibility yourself to become educated, and the great news about the Internet is that virtually every major Arab country in English or their leading Arabic newspaper are translated into English and are available online. There are so many opportunities today to be educated, to not leave it up to a politician or an anchor on the evening news to say, “This is what they’re saying”; you can find out what they’re saying.

You point out that our Arabic language skills, as a nation, are pretty poor.

Our universities and colleges need to offer more courses. It’s a shame that it’s easier to study ancient Greek than it is to study Arabic. Not that Ancient Greek isn’t important; but we have too many people at risk in the Middle East and too many interests at stake to not have a citizenry that can speak the language and translate the materials. Everything from our law enforcement agencies to our military to our diplomats have a language deficit. We can correct that if we demand that it be corrected.

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