[Its too late for Americans to win over many Arabs. Jan]

CAIRO: Many Arabs were too angry to listen to US President George W Bush express disgust at US soldiers™ mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, and their outrage stems from more than just the latest news from Iraq. Even before America invaded Iraq, its Middle East policies – particularly its support of Israel – had been viewed as anti-Arab. Its reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks has been portrayed as anti-Muslim.

And now Arabs are saying the prisoner-abuse scandal shows the United States is both. As a result, America has a hard time being heard in this part of the world at a time when reaching Arabs is critical to its foreign policy. The United States needs Arab support in the war on terror, in its nation-building project in Iraq and in its attempts to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush, who took the extraordinary step of trying to appeal directly to Arabs with appearances Wednesday on two Arabic television stations, acknowledged that the difficulty in getting the US message across to Arabs has only been exacerbated by the prisoners-abuse scandal.

“I think people in the Middle East who want to dislike America will use this as an excuse to remind people about their dislike,™™ the president told Al-Arabiya. Gehad Auda, an Egyptian political scientist, said the dislike is coupled with, and perhaps compounded by, ignorance of America. Arabs who heard Bush, for example, were likely frustrated by his refusal to condemn the soldiers involved until the investigation was complete.

“Because Arabs are not bred in a democracy, they don™t understand the whole idea of an investigation, they don™t understand due process,™™ Auda said. Philip Frayne, spokesman for the US Embassy in Cairo, acknowledged America has a problem communicating with Arabs, attributing much of that to the Arab perception that the United States is biased in favour of Israel. Polls (96)`have shown that the US government enjoys little credibility in much of the Arab world,™™ Frayne said.

“We are trying to address this hostility by appealing, in Arab media and in personal meetings, to a sense of reason and fairness.™™ The embassy, though, has had a strained relationship with the Arab news media. Late last year, Egypt™s Journalists Syndicate urged journalists not to attend US Ambassador David Welch™s news conferences or interview him because of a speech in which he took the Egyptian press to task for “proposing crazy conspiracy theories, or attacking the United States in very hostile terms.™™

On Wednesday, as Bush was appearing on Arab television, Frayne was distributing a US Embassy protest criticizing three Egyptian newspapers for publishing faked photographs purportedly showing American soldiers sexually abusing female prisoners in Iraq.

“The publication needlessly inflames an already heated atmosphere,™™ the Embassy protest said, saying the photographs had been downloaded from a pornographic Web site that had made clear they were fake. Editors of the newspapers involved rejected the US protest, saying the publication of the fake photos was in the context of fair criticism of American soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners. (96)`(96)`It is better for the embassy to hide in shame™™ because of the prisoner abuse case, said an unrepentant Mustafa Bakri, editor of the weekly Al-Osboa.

“The ambassador should resign if he has the slightest feeling about what happened.™™ Bush™s first appearance Wednesday was on Al-Hurra _ The Free One _ launched by his government late last year in what the president said then was an attempt (96)`(96)`cut through the hateful propaganda that fills the airwaves in the Muslim world.™™ Many Arabs, though, view al-Hurra, as a propaganda station. Jihad Ballout, spokesman for the popular Arab station Al-Jazeera, says the propaganda label isn™t fair.

But Ballout said the perception that the station is “an instrument of American foreign policy™™ may only have been cemented in the minds of viewers by Bush™s appearance. Bush skipped Al-Jazeera, often criticized as anti-American by US officials, but did appear on another Arab station, Al-Arabiya.

The Al-Hurra interview was broadcast first. Al-Arabiya editor Salah Negm said his station, scrambling to get its version on the air quickly after Al-Hurra™s broadcast, was forced to broadcast Bush with no Arabic translation at first. Most Arabs do not speak English.

URL: http://jang.com.pk/thenews/may2004-daily/07-0…/p>