Obama's Muslim outreach: Overtures

by Mike Dorning

Sending a signal to Muslims around the world, the White House this week passed over the politically influential American networks in favor of an Arab satellite channel, Al Arabiya, to air the first televised interview with Barack Obama as president.

The interview with the Saudi-owned television news channel, a major Arab outlet generally viewed as a more moderate voice than competitor Al Jazeera, is among a series of overtures Obama is making as he seeks to fundamentally transform the strained, often contentious relationship between America and the Muslim world.

"My job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect," Obama said in the interview, broadcast around the globe. "I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries"

With that biography, a middle name Hussein taken from the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, and a multilateral vision of foreign policy that repudiates the go-it-alone approach of his predecessor, Obama offers much that resonates with the Islamic public. That is especially so given the contrast with former President George W. Bush, a figure so reviled among the Arab public that an Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at Bush during a press conference was celebrated as a hero around the Middle East.

See the full report on Obama's appeal to the Muslim world in Tribune newspapers and here in the Swamp:

Obama's efforts to shift public perceptions of the United States in Islamic nations face a formidable obstacle in the U.S. alliance with Israel and grievances among many Muslims who feel the U.S follows a double standard in its treatment of Palestinians and Israelis, said Arab analysts and a former American diplomat. That view was only aggravated by Obama's perceived silence on the Israeli invasion of Gaza during his transition, they said.

But Obama, whose inauguration speech featured a direct appeal to the Muslim world, says he is determined to repair relations. And his advisers are already holding meetings on a strategy to achieve the goal, said a foreign policy official in the Obama administration.

"We are actively looking at and beginning to plan for a series of policy choices that shows that this is not some kind of posturing," said the official, who declined to provide specific details. "It's a big priority for him, and he raises it often with us."

During his first days in office, Obama moved to address two major irritants, ordering the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center closed within a year and appointing a high-level envoy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who negotiated the Northern Ireland peace agreement for President Bill Clinton.

Throughout his presidential campaign and transition, Obama has stressed a foreign policy strategy that gives greater weight to engaging public opinion abroad, particularly in the fight against radical Islamic extremists. Some of the foreign policy advisers who joined Obama early in the campaign confided in interviews during primary season that one reason they supported him was his capacity to clearly signal a break with Bush Administration policies not only toward foreign governments but also toward the people of foreign lands.

He demonstrated his ability to speak directly to foreign audiences during the campaign with a speech in Berlin that attracted a crowd of 200,000.

In one of his earliest campaign speeches on combating terrorism, in August 2007, Obama highlighted a promise to go during his first 100 days in office to "a major Islamic forum" and deliver a speech "to redefine our struggle" against Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists.

Obama reaffirmed that commitment on Al Arabiya, though he batted back a question on where he would deliver the address, saying "I'm not going to break the news right here."

While polls conducted before the U.S. election showed Arab public opinion favoring Obama over GOP rival Sen. John McCain, they showed much less enthusiasm for him than in Europe or Africa. And the same polls showed deep skepticism in the Arab world over whether Obama would fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy.

Shibley Telhami, a Middle East scholar at the University of Maryland, said that orders Obama has issued to end torture and close Guantanamo and CIA prisons are "hugely significant" because they address the same Arab complaints of "a double standard" that fuel anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Bush Administration treatment of prisoners is perceived in the Islamic world as a message that the United States is willing to treat Muslims as though they were not worthy of treatment prescribed by universal standards of human rights, Telhami said.

"Who are the people in Guantanamo? Who are the people in Abu Ghraib? Who are the people in CIA prisons? They are all Arabs and Muslims," Telhami said. "It sends a picture of how (Muslims) are treated."

Still, Rhami Khouri, a columnist for the Daily Star in Beirut, said Obama will be able to make little progress in turning around perceptions as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers.

"There's generally a positiveness and openness about his tone and rhetoric and some of his substance. You don't hear a lot of criticism of him," Khouri said "But if he supports Israel completely the next time they bomb Palestinians, it's all going to go to waste."

Obama visited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a trip to the region last summer and he was the first Middle Eastern leader Obama called after taking office. But the new president also repeatedly pledged support for Israel during his campaign, traveling to the Israeli town of Sderot to stand before a stack of twisted rockets and defend Israel's right to stop attacks from Gaza.

Obama warned in the Al Arabiya interview that "Israel's security is paramount." But, he added, "what we want to do is listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and built up over the last several years."

Though the new U.S. Middle East peace envoy's mother was Lebanese, Mitchell has not been active in promoting Arab causes and assembled a Senate voting record that was solidly pro-Israel, including regular votes against sales of U.S. weaponry to Arab states.

Even so, Mitchell's appointment has provoked some rumblings from politically influential pro-Israel groups.
Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Jewish Week that he was "concerned" by Mitchell's appointment. He cited Mitchell's reputation for being "meticulously even-handed," which he contrasted with an American policy that "has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support."