No Wonder We’re Losing the Propaganda War   August 7, 2006

Karen Hughes of the State Department says the answer to Al-Jazeera’s poisonous propaganda is to go on the channel to offer the U.S. side of the story. The Dallas Morning News says ”she’s intent on ‘changing the culture’ of the State Department, to empower ambassadors and others to speak out more often and more forcefully – even on the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, which the administration has previously scorned.” The paper adds that “Ms. Hughes, who has the rank of ambassador, has appeared several times on Al-Jazeera,  despite what she calls ‘legitimate concerns’ that some of its coverage has been inflammatory.” She tells the paper, ”as a communicator, I feel it’s important to get our voice on the channels that people are watching. And Al-Jazeera is the channel that people are watching in the Middle East.”

On her Web site, however, it is said that the U.S. must “Isolate and marginalize the violent extremists” and “confront their ideology of tyranny and hate.” How is that accomplished by going on Al-Jazeera, an outlet for tyranny and hate?

A better approach is to tell the autocrats who run Qatar, where Al-Jazeera is based, to pull the plug on this channel or face the consequences.What has Qatar been doing in the current crisis? The U.N. passed its resolution on Lebanon 14-1 — the one was Qatar. Qatar’s leading English daily paper proundly reports that “Qatar tried to push through a resolution in the UN Security Council to condemn the Israeli aggression in Lebanon but the United States blocked it with a veto, says the Palestinian ambassador in Doha.”

Previously, on July 6, AP reported that Qatar circulated its own draft U.N. Security Council resolution “demanding Israel end its offensive in the Gaza Strip and release the Palestinian officials it has arrested.” AP added that, “The draft faced immediate opposition from the United States and France, which called it unbalanced in its criticism of Israel. The document does not condemn the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants and makes no mention of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel this week.”

 Qatar is supposed to be a “moderate” Arab regime. And Al-Jazeera was supposed to promote democracy in the Arab world.

Wake up Ambassador Hughes!