Interpreting Islam to Muslims by Graham Fuller

Interpreting Islam to Muslims

February 18, 2015 by Graham E. Fuller • http://grahamefuller.com/interpreting-islam-to-muslims/

150218- Interpreting Islam to Muslims

Can’t we ever learn? Here goes the White House again, appointing a “new” task force designed to “blunt the ISIS message.” Washington seems to believe that a main source of ISIS success to date lies in American failure to get the right word out, to tell Muslims what the true story is about Islam, ISIS, and American goals.
If we think back to 2001—George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT)—we might recall that he appointed not one, but three successive PR experts and spinmeisters to bring the truth about America’s GWOT to the Muslim world. We had Charlotte Beers (a “legendary” advertising executive), Margaret Tutwiler (a skilled political operative on domestic spin), and then Karen Hughes, a vice president of a huge public relations firm. Each was pressed into service to “sell America”; all quickly found their swords blunted on trips overseas in talking to real Muslims who found these accomplished professional PR experts to be grossly out of touch with regional realities. Such campaigns were designed to show what a great place the US was, how multicultural the US is, and how noble our goals were in the Middle East. It didn’t sell. Few Muslims thought the US was a terrible place, but they surely thought that US policies were terrible—indeed literally murderous in the death and destruction visited upon their societies in regional wars. http://grahamefuller.com/interpreting-islam-to-muslims/