Better late than never, the US State Department is becoming actively engaged in talking with Arab and other blogs. This was something I recommended as I was leaving State, but the idea just couldn’t get traction three years ago. Now, though, direct engagement with bloggers in the Middle East and South Asia is starting to take hold, though Neil MacFarquhar at The New York Times thinks the effort might be dropped when Karen Hughes is no longer leading the Public Diplomacy group. I certainly hope not.

State is not the quickest to engage new technologies, unfortunately. In this case, ‘new’ is at least 10 years old. But now that the veil has lifted, I hope it will see new opportunities to make use of blogs, both actively and reactively.

I was pleased to see that Public Diplomacy—or an officer at the US Mission in Saudi Arabia—was smart enough to identify Ahmed Al-Omran, who blogs at Saudi Jeans, as one worthy of attention. He has had a useful trip to the US, visiting Washington, DC, Montana, Wyoming, Alabama, and now New York City. I’ve spoken with him about his trip so far and look forward to what he writes when he’s back in the Kingdom.

At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate
NEIL MacFARQUHAR

WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.

Brent E. Blaschke, the project director, said the idea was to reach “swing voters,” whom he described as the silent majority of Muslims who might sympathize with Al Qaeda yet be open to information about United States government policy and American values.

Some analysts question whether the blog team will survive beyond the tenure of Karen P. Hughes, the confidante of President Bush who runs public diplomacy. The department expects to add seven more team members within the next month — four more in Arabic, two in Farsi and one in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.
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