Arab Voices: What They are Saying and Why it Matters, Iowa City, Iowa, March 8, 2011

- [Joan Kjaer] Hello, I'm Joan Kjaer, Interim Director of Communications and Relations for International Programs at the University of Iowa and a member of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council Program Committee. Delighted to invite you to yet another lecture in our 27th year of programming focused on international issues, policy, and affairs. ICFRC is a community effort and we're delighted to have the continued support of our loyal members. Without your contributions, we would be unable to provide this forum. For those of you wishing to join the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council or donate in support of our efforts you can speak to Sue Rolta in the back of the room, call the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council offices at 319-335-0351 or join online at internationalcorridor.org. Before we get started, we wanted to direct you to three items at the center of your tables. The first item is a Save the Date list of our upcoming lectures. As you're all well aware, sometimes we're blessed with last minute speakers and these opportunities tend to be swift yet so valuable that we can't pass them up. As a last minute announcement is no exception, we've been informed that His Excellency Ambassador Peter Burian will be in the corridor area this week and has agreed to speak to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. Those of you here today who may wish to attend the lecture, please feel free to sign up on your way out of the door and there'll two sign-up sheets available. This is a last minute addition that we couldn't pass up. We hope you can join us. The second is a table tent providing details of our Give a Gift of Knowledge offer where members can purchase three luncheon meals for $25 and gift them to any non-member, friend, colleague, or family member if you're interested. And the third is an announcement that James Zogby's book, Arab Voices, can be purchased in the back of the room at the conclusion of today's program. For those of you tuning in via radio or television, please visit our website for details on how to purchase Dr. Zogby's insightful book at internationalcorridor.org. The format today will be our usual format. For those of you who are visiting and not familiar with the usual, our speaker will give his formal remarks, during which time you're welcome to use the question cards at the center of the table and jot down your inquiries. Around 1:00 when the speaker concludes, we'll pause briefly for question cards to be collected and for those who must leave. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible network of sponsors and collaborators whose support has allowed us to provide today's lecture. Huge thank you to the University of Iowa Honors Program and to International Programs, both of which contribute time, talent and logistics which are vital to our organization. We also extend our appreciation to New Pioneer Co-op whose generous contribution made today's events possible. If you cross paths with any of these individuals or their representatives, please take a moment to thank them. At this point, I'll pass on the mic to Newman Abuissa, a colleague of Zogby's and president of the Council for International Visitors to Iowa Cities. Newman Abuissa. - [Newman Abuissa] Thank you, Joan. I want to put the plug first, I guess. For civic, Council of International Visitor to Iowa City, we bring many visitors to Iowa and some of them are from the Arab world and I think meeting visitors is the best way to know people from other countries. Jim Zogby studies the Middle East and this country as well and he does polling around the globe and his book is an analysis of his findings. It's not anecdotal or not something bias but it's based on real data. Dr. Zogby is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington D.C. based organization which serves as the political policy research arm for the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have lead Arab-American efforts to secure political empowerment in the US and that's how he encouraged me, actually, to participate in this process as well. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab-American into the political mainstream. Zogby currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the ACLU, the Human Rights Watch Board of Directors for the Middle East and North Africa, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Additionally, he is a senior advisor for the polling firm Zogby International where he is responsible for the firm's ground-breaking polling across the Middle East. Since 2001, he has hosted the award-winning Viewpoint with James Zogby on Abu Dhabi television, Link TV, Dish Network, and DirectTV. It's my honor and pleasure to introduce Dr. James Zogby. - [James Zogby] Well thank you all for coming. I'm delighted to be here. I want to thank Newman and Danielle from the Council for the invitation and the work and thank Joan for hosting me the other night on her program and for the introductions today. I'm here to talk about a book that I wrote about a part of the world that is increasingly important. Important in its own right but increasingly important to America. I wrote the book because, as important as this part of the world is, given the fact that we have over 100,000 troops stationed there, that we've lost more lives there than anywhere else in the world since the end of Vietnam, the fact that we've invested more money there, sent more weapons there, have more political interests at stake and at risk, and allies at risk, and despite the fact that every US president since the end of Vietnam has had his presidency determined, success of failure, by how he did in the Middle East, despite all that, we don't know this region at all. And because we don't know the region, we make mistakes time and again. You can't carry on a conversation with somebody without spending enough time in the beginning to get to know that person, to know, as my mom used to tell me, how do you know what they're sayin' if you don't listen to 'em? She'd argue with me that I'd get into fights with my Aunt Marie and she'd say I could see ya sittin' at the end of your seat and ya had your answer already prepared. And ya weren't listening, she'd argue, she'd tell me that I was wrong at the top of my voice most of the time. And it was a hard lesson to learn, to listen, but we don't listen. We don't listen in the Arab world, we don't hear what they're sayin' and sometimes we think we know what they're saying but we're not paying attention to them. So that even now, in the midst of all this upheaval and all the trauma that is taking place in that region, we don't have a clue what is happening. It's not just our politicians who don't. Our media doesn't and the public, as a whole, does not either. So significant events pass us by and if it were just that the events passed us by, we could get away with it. If we didn't have 100,000 troops there, if we hadn't spent the money that we'd spent, hadn't the interests at stake, if it were just a part of the world where we sort of could afford to be sort of viewers of the passing scene as my father-in-law used to say, that would be just fine. But we're too deeply invested not to know. Too deeply engaged not to understand and pay attention. And the cast of characters are going to be trompin' through your state in the next year. I never knew whether you guys like that or don't like that but I'm not runnin' for a thing. Just my life most of the time, that's about it. But they are notorious at not listening. Except to the sound of their own voices which they absolutely adore. And they talk about the Middle East and I mean specifically, some of the cast of characters are coming through, like people like Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, I mean I know and have listened to these folks, I've served on committees with Gingrich, absolutely not a clue what is going on in the Arab world, not a clue about Muslims, but never shy to give an opinion and never an opinion but always absolute certainty. And the danger ... You can do that in interpersonal relationships, you just end up gettin' a divorce. They've actually done that, ya know? That's not the problem, the problem is is that when you're fighting wars and you have interests at risk, you don't have the luxury of tuning them out and pontificating as if you know when you don't know. Look, when we went to war in Iraq, National Geographic did a survey. They found that 11% of Americans could find Iraq on a map in 2003. In 2009, same survey was done again, it shot up to 37%. We had lost 4,000 young men and women, still couldn't find it on a map. I maintain that when we went into Iraq, the lie was not the weapons of mass destruction. That was not the lie. The lie was that it would be over in six days. The lie was that it would be six months and we'd be out of there. That's what Paul Wolfowitz said. They also told us that two billion dollars tops and Iraqi oil money would kick in and it wouldn't cost us another penny. There'd be flowers in the street and we'd be greeted as liberators and democracy would bloom through the whole Middle East and we would be celebrated as having brought God's gift, that's what President Bush said, God's gift which was our duty to do to the people in that region. They didn't have a clue. What they were doing is what is a rather timeless human quality, when you don't understand something, you see it through the prism of what you do understand. So we saw it through World War II. Oh yes, it's like World War II, it's like we're marching down the streets just like when we went down the Champs d'Elysées and we liberated Paris or when we were in Berlin and we liberated Germany. Iraq was not Paris, Iraq was not Berlin. It was Baghdad and for Arabs it was the magical city but I remember being interviewed by a reporter, he said well what do think about this and I said, well, we're seein' ourselves as World War II soldiers goin' down the streets of Berlin but they're lookin' at us and seein' us as the Mongols. He said whatta they have to do with it? I said, that was the first time Baghdad was sacked. But if we don't know, then we make these judgments. We make judgments based on what we think we know rather than what we do know. So because we don't know and our knowledge base is so low, we end up seeing the world partly through this prism that we have, partly through the popular culture that creates mythologies. I mean if you watch American television or you watch our movies or you as a kid grow up readin' comic books or cartoon strips or see cartoons Saturday morning, the images of Arab are largely understood by you. They're bad guys. They're either terrorists or oil sheiks. Now, are there terrorists? There absolutely are. Are there oil sheiks? There absolutely are. You don't see Ahmed, the guy who gets up in the morning and goes and delivers two babies and then comes home and saves some guy who had a heart attack or somethin' like that. You don't see the average everyday person. He's never there. So the only image you get are these bad guys and the result therefore is that our what starts for us a zero fact-free zone where there's no knowledge 'cause we didn't get it in school. Most of you are my age and so you understand, when we went to school, the textbook we studied, and they haven't gotten much better, but the textbook we used was, I called it Stone Age Man to Ike. It started with the Stone Age man in Europe, couldn't be Africa, I mean God would not have made the first man there, I mean for God's sake give me break, will ya. So it was Stone Age man in Europe and then it went to the Greeks and the Romans and then it went to the Holy Roman Empire and then it went to the Dark Ages and then it went to the modern, the emergence of the nation state, and then it went to us. Sort of the culmination of it all. They didn't factor in at all. There was no sense of interdependency. There was no sense that they actually played a role, the rest of the world, in informing us or shaping us. The riches of the East, the Silk Road and all of that, well, I mean it couldn't have been them. It was Marco Polo, he found it. Wasn't lost, actually. I mean he went and brought 'em back but that wasn't how it happened either because actually what we now know is that it was the Mongols who brought civilization west. It wasn't Marco Polo who went and brought 'em back for us. This was not out there, made by God, waiting for us to find it and use it and make our lives better. Because they didn't know how to use it themselves or somethin' like that. Africa was the dark continent. The only mention of Arabs in the textbook was this picture that I'm sure you'll recall. It had the two pyramids and guy on a camel sittin' in front of it. Which I now think was actually an example of product placement. Because Camel cigarettes needed people to know what those two pyramids were 'cause if you didn't you wouldn't have known what was on the cigarette pack. I meanI don't know what that is. Lucky Strike, Bullseye, I know what that is but what are those two triangle things and that guy on that funny animal? But if ya saw the picture, ya understood. There was no discussion of Arab history or civilization or the contribution. The fact that, for example, when Europe was in the Dark Ages that Arab civilization was flowering and that the contributions of the Greeks and Romans passed south and were developed by them and the philosophers whose names we knew were not actually the names we knew them to be. There was no Avicenna, it was actually Ibn Sina and there was no Averroes, it was actually Abu Rushd and so we didn't even know their names or that they were Arab or that they were Muslim. The fact that Baroque music, where did it come from? It comes from the Arabic music and even RTE, the Irish television, did a marvelous feature on the Irish step-dance and Irish lilting and finds its roots in North Africa. We live in this interdependent world where we ... I mean, Italian spaghetti? If it hadn't been for Chinese noodles and Mexican tomatoes, they'd still be eatin' grains and cheese and olives. And nothin' against, I mean the point is is that this is not to demean one culture over another, it is to say that we live in a world like Martin Luther King when he said, by the time I get up in the morning, eat breakfast, shower, get in my car, go to work, I am dependent upon people from 43 countries in the world. It's an interdependent world. We are all in this together but you don't get that from our history book. That's not the story you learn. So we start with a zero base, we then have popular culture spreading myths, we have political culture giving certitude, people saying, oh yeah, no, I know them, I heard Sarah Palin talk the other day and she told me that, ya know, got to watch out for those. And yet that is where a lot of our folks end up getting knowledge from. It's not just knowledge but it's certainty. I know it. The hysteria, we're having hearings tomorrow in Congress about Islamic radicalization. Peter King goes on and on and on about how they're not like us. They don't support our military. They don't sign up in wars. You go to Arlington Cemetery and see the number of crescents on tombstones and tell me Muslims don't sign up in our military. But people come to believe that stuff and it becomes dangerous when they do. So because we don't know and we make foreign policy blunders based on what we don't know, it's important that we challenge ourselves to learn who they are. The best way to learn is just listen and that's why I poll. I've been goin' to the region for about 40 years now. First time was I spent time in a refugee camp doing dissertation research in Lebanon. And I've been goin' back ever since and had incredible experiences in almost every country in that world and I've met people and it kind of intrigues me because I would always say and I hear a conversation about Saudi Arabia and I'd say they're not the Saudis I know. Or I'd hear about Palestinian something and I'd say but that's not Palestine that I know and that sense of generalizing and sort of, well all Arabs are this, and I'd say, well no, that's not my dad. That's not the world I understand. That's not the people I've dealt with. Myths like Arabs are just angry people, they're just always angry at something, they hate America. When you poll Americans and say why do Arabs dislike America, 80% say they hate our values. 80% say they hate our values. When you poll across the Arab world, 65% of Arabs in the aggregate say they love American values. The disconnect is that we're not listening but when you poll, you listen. When I talk to 4,000 people from Morocco to Iraq and I organize the data that I get back by country, by gender, by age, and I put it all together, it's as if I opened a window and heard 4,000 voices screaming and saying, listen to us. Hear what we have to say. Pay attention 'cause we're talkin' to you. And they tell us things about their own lives and what they want. They're not obsessed with the things we think they're obsessed with. When they go to bed at night, they don't go to bed hatin' America and wake up hatin' Israel and spend the rest of the day in the mosque bein' inflamed by a preacher or watchin' Al Jazeera gettin' angrier. What they actually do is they, number one concern in life, is jobs. Number two concern is their children and families. After that comes education and healthcare. Sound familiar? I mean, they're like us, they're people and they have lives and they want to live them and they want to improve 'em and they want 'em to be better and they care about the very things that we care about. When they watch television they watch it to be entertained. Number one shows they watch are movies and reality shows and game shows and dramas and soap operas. It's kind of funny, I was in Saudi Arabia during the beginning of the Tunisian situation and at the same time that the Lebanese government was collapsing and had a funny situation where we were watchin' this and it's about an hour of it and they're watchin' the news and they're debating it back and forth and all of a sudden the 28-year-old son of one of the guys comes tearin' in the room and he said it's on and grabs the remote and turns the channel to a show called Arab's Got Talent. Which is exactly what it sou-- It's like American Idol and it's a little hokier, a little hokier, but the same intensity that went into the debating that was goin' on during the Tunisian discussion as we were watchin' the news followed with which guy had the best talent and ought to win the contest that night and when the show was over, we went back to doin' what we were doin'. They watch television to be entertained. And it can be quite entertaining. So when we listen and pay attention and when we poll and look at the results, we learn about the texture of the society that we just don't understand. We find out that they really do like us. They like the American people, they like American products, they like American culture, what they don't like is the way we treat them. People don't judge you at the end of the day by what you say about yourself. They judge you by how you treat them. And the policies, it's our policies in the region that become the problem. Our policies have, in fact, been hurtful. And have not sent the message that we care. They like our products. They like our products because our products convey a way of life. One guy said to me one time, an anecdote I never forgot, he said you're different, fundamentally different, than the Japanese, the Germans, and the Chinese. They sell products and you sell a way of life and people want your way of life. So when you're in Saudi Arabia and somebody goes to Starbucks or when you're in Kuwait and somebody goes to McDonald's or you're in Jordan and they're goin' to Pizza Hut, it's not 'cause the food is better or the coffee's better, it's 'cause they do an American thing. It's sort of like we sometimes want to do a little exotic thing, they do an American thing. They say let's go to Pizza Hut tonight and we'll do an American thing and there's a standard. I mean one of the things that's so great about our corporate culture is that there is this standard where you know you go into a McDonald's in Iowa City or a McDonald's in Paris, you're going to get exactly the same fare with exactly the same quality of service everywhere and people know that and so it's viewed as kind of an American way of doing things. It's a great egalitarian business culture and it's one that is appreciated. That's what they like, they like that about us. We just don't know it and don't build on it and don't pay attention to it. That standard for excellence and for equal treatment ought to convey to our foreign policy and it often doesn't and that's the problem. That's what they don't understand. They say, you guys get it in so many other areas, why don't you get it in this one? So I wrote the book to kind of deal with some of those, to deal with some of the myths we have. Arabs are all the same or that they're all angry or that they're all backward or that they don't want change. To look at some of the blunders that we've gotten into because of that and then to make some recommendation as to what we could doto actually move ourselves forward. Before I look at the recommendations I actually take a look at the folks who are gettin' it right, the individuals, some of the agencies of government, some of the programs, some of the universities that are doing some pretty extraordinary things in the Middle East, to send the message we have to get it right. But at the end of the day, the change that has to come has to come here. Has to come at home. This is not about us changing just how we behave in the Middle East, it's how we as Americans understand that part of the world and do we understand that part of the world. We went to war in Iraq. We transformed an entire country and yet we do not understand that country and do not have ownership of what we did. I think that that is something that must change in America. We are, whether we want to be or not, we're an empire. I am so damn tired of George Bush saying things like we're going to war, we have no imperial ambit-- It's not a question of do we seize that land and own it and put it on our map. We have a role in the world that is the role of an empire. The lives of nations depend on our decisions. And we know it in one part of our lives but we don't know those people, care about those people, and when the chickens come home to roost, in immigration right? We want to deny. There was a wonderful, wonderful philosopher who I absolutely adored when I was in college, Jacob Bronowski, he did a TV series called The Ascent of Man, do you remember that? An extraordinary, extraordinary book and TV series but he also wrote a book on truth and value and I read ithe was on the commission that went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evaluate what happened after the bombs and the opening description in the book is he's on the plane flying in to Nagasaki and he looks down and he sees this wasteland that had been this depressed, industrial zone that was now even more depressed and just destroyed and on the airplane radio comes a song that was popular back after the war and it was Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby? And he said the words haunted 'im because he said he looked down there and he said Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby? Who's going to claim ownership for this? We use the word paternity to sort of taunt high school kids and tell 'em behave yourself. But all of our actions have a paternity. They all have a consequence. We have to have ownership for what we've done. In the world. We're too big a nation to not have ownership. To not say we actually did this, now let's make it right. Let's make it better, let's do it in a way that shows we understand what we're doin' here. I come back to the fact that the folks who come trompin' through here, they want to lead the nation, they want to lead the world, they cannot claim ignorance, they cannot claim innocence, they cannot claim to just get by with talkin' about this, that, or the other and not talkin' about what they're going to do if they inherit the mantle of leadership in a part of the world that is desperately looking for America to understand it and be better. We used to be the city on the hill. That's the America we talked about. I'm afraid that we've lost that mantle and the fact is that we need to get it back. I think that there is a will on the part of the American people to do that and the question is we have to learn more and change the way we lead in the world. I leave you on that and I tell you that I hope you enjoy the book. I hope you find it useful. It has an appendix that includes groups like yours in the back and talks about these are the things you have to do. These are the groups you ought to join. You are part of a growing group of Americans who say, the world matters to me and I congratulate you for that. The power in this room of ideas and commitment to understanding is something that has to expand and broaden out to more and more generations of our countrymen so that people, in fact, not just inform themselves but one of the things about learning, I learned this lesson a long time ago, I was doin' my dissertation research, I was in a refugee camp in Lebanon, and I spent three weeks there and I interviewed people and I got their stories and dutifully logged them down and as I was leaving the camp, the grandmother of this young man who'd been my guide in the camp, she grabbed me by the arm, little old woman, very sort of weathered, she'd had a hard life, and she looked into my eyes and she said now you've heard our story, what're you going to do? And I learned then that when you listen and when you understand, you have a responsibility to do somethin'. I think that ... I hope we do. I hope we do make some of the changes that have to be made. The process is already underway. People are beginning to do it. Some of the programs in our government are gettin' better. Some of our universities are doin' good stuff. I write about 'em, I show 'em as a road map of things we can do but a lot more has to happen for us to really get on the right side of history here. And I thank you for the attention and I'll take any questions you have. - [Joan Kjaer] Did you see the current events coming before we all witnessed it on TV? Would you have imagined that Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya would be going through what they're going through now? - [James Zogby] There's no way in the polling that we could've predicted. What the polling would tell us though are what the issues are and how serious the issues were. The economy in Egypt has always been an issue of dramatic importance. Would we be able to understand from that that a demonstration would gather, that a demonstration would grow, that a demonstration would be attacked by thugs, and that instead of withering would then triple and quadruple in size because people got mad? I actually think that the demonstrators themselves, some of whom I know, were surprised at their success. They had no idea it would work as quickly as it did and as dramatically as it did. So I think that they were surprised and I was as surprised as they were. Am I pleased? Absolutely. I'm worried a little bit. I'm afraid that I don't want to see this aborted before it's concluded because it hasn't happened yet. All that's happened is that the regime, the face of regime, is gone but the regime is still in place. The military is the regime in Egypt and it has not had its wings clipped at all so there's a lot of work to do yet. But no, couldn't have predicted it, was surprised, but understand what the issues are that they're dealing with. - [Joan Kjaer] Thank you. Here's a question. Should the US, because it is an empire, feel an obligation to intervene in countries around the world with internal conflict? - [James Zogby] The answer is no and our polling is very clear about that. When we poll, and you'll see in the book there's a whole one page of ... And don't be afraid of the book being a polling book, it's not. It's mostly a lot of stories and a lot of people that ya meet that amplify some of the polling but there's one chart where we ask people, and we've asked this question now going back over a decade, and we present the results in each year, what are the most important issues for you? And what we learn are the ones I told you about, jobs and about this this this this this. Then we say, if the United States were to be helpful, what issues could it be most helpful in? They tell us they want us involved in job creation, they want us involved in healthcare, they want us involved in education. Now in different countries, you will also find that corruption will be a top issue or in another country it'll be nepotism will be a top issue or in another country it'll be human rights and respect for civil rights will be a top issue but when America is thrown into the equation, those issues drop off the charts. No country wants us involved in their internal affairs. Now you may have individual leaders who will come here and say please get involved in our issues but the people as a whole do not want us involved. Just think if Sweden had come over in the middle of our healthcare debate and said, hey, we can help you fix that. Or if the UK volunteered to help us solve our handgun problem. We would not take a likin' to it. Saudis do not want America involved in their women issues. They know what the problems are. They know what they have to fix. But the chapter I have in my book is called Reform but they want their reform, not our reform. Societies change on their own. I mean this sort of bizarre ambition of George Bush that we were going to remake Iraq, well look how successful that one was. Basically what they're saying right now is that Nouri al-Maliki is probably going to go back to being Saddam. With 100-plus thousand people dead, 4,500 of our people dead, a country in waste, 1/5 of the population internally displaced, never able to go back to their home or as refugees, and what we figure out is that, 'cause we didn't understand the damn place in the first place and tried to impose change, guess what? Didn't happen. So the answer is an empire behaves responsibly. Not carelessly. And we have been careless in the application of power. Meddling in places we didn't belong. Doing things that we had no business doin'. - [Joan Kjaer] Thank you. What percentage of the Arab world is violent and sees itself as at war with the West? Is this group on the increase today? - [James Zogby] I swear to you that most Arabs, most Arabs, overwhelming majority of Arabs, see themselves as people who basically want feed their families, find jobs, get educated, improve going into the future. When we have done polling on extremism or on violence, we'll find 3% here, 11% there, depends on the country. It depends on the country and depends on the problem. When you so roil a population, like in Iraq, there's a lot of people in Iraq who don't like us right now and don't see us as having helped anything. There's a lot of Palestinians right now who do not like us. I mean let's be clear about that. There are Egyptians right now who are furious at the fact that not only did we do bad things but that we had their government complicitous in those bad things. I said one time to an interviewer, she asked me should America dump Mubarak because would it make our standing go up in Egypt, and I said you got the question backwards. They don't like us in Egypt because we supported their president. They don't like their president 'cause he supported us. He supported us on Iraq, he supported us on rendition. We didn't want to be torturing people so we sent 'em to Egypt and he tortured them for us. These are things people don't forget. These are shame-- I mean we've all forgotten about Abu Ghraib right now. It's sort of like passed from our history. It has not because there was no accountability for it. It was not a private here or a sergeant there responsible. This was a systematic practice that went on and it went on for the longest of times and no one has been held accountable. No one's been held accountable for torture. No one's been held accountable for rendition. People know that and they're mad. So, yeah, there is a hard core of people who are angry. There are people in Lebanon still angry about the fact that we gave Israel a green light to do what it did in 2006. And earlier than that. So there are people mad at us and I think we have to deal with that. They like our people. They like our culture. They like our way of life. They're convinced we just don't like them. And we've done everything we can to show them that we don't like them and so they feel like jilted lovers. I mean that would be the way. We don't apply our values. It's sort of like my mom would say ... I'd come home and I'd be the misbehavin' 12-year-old or 13-year-old that I was. And 14 and 15-year-old, okay, all right. Okay, I can see eyes lookin' at me. 16, 17, okay. And she'd say, I talked to somebody and they said you're such a wonderful guy. I don't see much of that. And that's some of this. It's like they know how good we are. They know what we're capable of. And they wonder why don't they get any of it. - [Joan Kjaer] How does the US government get to know Libyans? - [James Zogby] Well, in the middle of all this it's a little late. I'd say right now we're doin' absolutely the right thing which is tightening the screws as much as we can. We cannot militarily become engaged in this situation. And even if we set up a no-fly zone it's not going to make a difference on the ground because these are not jet planes this is helicopters and the kind of things that are goin' on are not the things that a no-fly zone can actually attack. And as Secretary Gates said, to establish a no-fly zone does become a hostile act where we'd have to shoot out their air defense systems and the point right now is that when your reputation is what it is and it is not a good reputation. What we would give is we'd give that madman a chance to sort of resurrect himself as the anti-imperialist fighter. Struggling against American intervention in the Middle East. We do not need it and we don't need to give him that gift. So the best we can do right now is the humanitarian assistance we're providing to refugees, trying to get people out of the country that need to get out of the country and providing them with safe passage, back to Bangladesh or wherever they need to go, and tightening the screws on the regime and letting the regime know that at the end of the day, there's no escapin'. At some point, they're going to want to leave Tripoli and go somewhere and there's no place for 'em to go and there's no money left and there's no oil going to be pumped and so, frankly, if we have to pay a little bit of a price for it, frankly, the price we would pay to impose sanctions and not let Libya sell their oil would be far less in the short term than getting militarily engaged and then inheriting that country in the long term which we do not need. Plus, we don't have the resources at this point to handle a third war in the Middle East. But there are things we can do and I think the president's handling this one right. - [Joan Kjaer] What's your opinion regarding the future of Christianity in the Arab world, Middle East, especially in light of the most recent political changes in places like Egypt? - [James Zogby] It worries me no end. Iraq, and I think it'll be forever a stain on George Bush's soul, if I am bold enough to speak about that and I don't think I am so I shouldn't say that. Just a stain on his record, how's that? I don't put stains on people's souls. I don't have the ri-- I'd like to. God didn't give me that power. But the fact is is that what this war did and what we never talked about was it destroyed Christianity in Iraq. It destroyed it. They were the first victims of ethnic cleansing. They were the most vulnerable population. This was a community of about 1.2 million people that had been there for 2,000 years almost, since the beginning of the Christian era and there's about 300,000 left and those who are there are living in fear or living not in their homes but in other parts of the country. It is a travesty what has happened and what is the biggest, as I say, we don't talk about it. That you get all these Christian right-wing guys saying oh so we took down the dictator duh duh duh. Had no clue that their co-religionists paid the biggest price for all of this. So that is a problem. It's a country by country problem. In Egypt, where there was some tension, and there was an explosion in a church, the beginning of the Christmas holidays, it turns out that that explosion was not the result of sectarian violence. It turns out that that explosion, it appears right now from records that have been taken from this internal security files that it was an engineered plot by the Minister of Interior who was tryin' to sort of create an incident that would be blamed on Hamas that could be used to justify Egypt's continued strangulation of Gaza. And what was exciting about Tahrir Square was the degree to which Christians and Muslims unified. With Christians protecting, in the early days, when they were afraid of the police, protecting Muslims at prayer, on Fridays, and Muslims in turn protecting Christians and Christian churches. So I think that the shock of the explosion and the unity that grew up around Tahrir Square is a hopeful sign in Egypt. Lebanon is an entirely different ball of wax. The Christian community in Lebanon is very secure. It is rife with political dissent. I mean ya have of the Christian community support the Hezbollah government and half support the Hariri government and they have their own internal political reasons for doing doing so but they're free to do and be as dumb as they want to be. The problem that I have in Lebanon and I'm a Lebanese Maronite Christian is that we've actually ... I don't want to say this and get myself in trouble with my co-religionists and this is a problem in Lebanon and it's the result of the French having created a political system that made sect almost a political party so that to be Christian in Lebanon is to have a political identity not a religious identity. And my Jesus didn't die on the cross saying form a party. And he didn't die on the cross and say have a militia and call it a Christian militia in my name. I mean that's not my faith. So there are many devout and believing Christians in Lebanon but there are also there's this politics to Christianity in Lebanon that is worrisome and of concern. Probably the worst place and the least attention is the Christian community in Palestine. Which was 10 to 15% of the population, is now less than 1% of the population. Nazareth has been strangled to death, literally strangled to death. The Israelis took all of the land around Nazareth in 1948, locked people into a little town, they couldn't get out. I wrote an article back at Christmastime saying that if Christmastime had happened, if the birth of Christ happened now, none of that story could have happened. Somebody from Nazareth couldn't marry somebody from Bethlehem. They couldn't have ever traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And the kings couldn't of gotten in the border in the first place and when they heard that Herod was comin' after 'em, Joseph couldn't of lead them out to Egypt. The situation is horrific right now for Christians and people are leaving in droves. It's not Iraq where they're afraid for their lives but there's no future. There's no future. Bethlehem, which was a delightful little community, has literally been strangled. I mean when I went there the last time that this hill was there, was 1998. When we went, Bill Clinton lead a group to light the Christmas tree in Manger Square and between Bethlehem and Jerusalem is a hill called Jabal Abu Ghneim and it's this delightful green zone. It's just a green hill and today there's 17,000 people living on Jabal Abu Ghneim, it's called Har Homa and the Israelis want to expand it further. They call it a neighborhood of Jerusalem which is just nonsense. This is not a neighborhood of nothin'. This is Bethlehem land and it's six miles outside of Jerusalem but they call it a neighborhood and they get the people thinkin' here, oh it's just a neighborhood, I mean it's just a neighborhood. When they call these things neighborhoods, what they call Jerusalem is an area of land eight miles this way, ten miles that way, and six miles that way that encompass a large chunk of the West Bank that had 22 Palestinian villages in it and they've engulfed it all and they say it's Jerusalem. It's almost like if Cedar Rapids decided this is Cedar Rapids right now. And you're just a neighborhood of Cedar Rapids, which you're not, you're your own community and these places are their own communities but Israel calls them neighborhoods and therefore start building up around 'em and there's this wall that is literally 30 feet high that surrounds the one side of Bethlehem that cutting if off from Jerusalem. It is very oppressive. It is very oppressive. And so people are leaving and they're just not goin' back 'cause there's no life to going back. So I am worried. Interestingly enough, the one place where Christians are secure is Syria which never gets enough credit for that. It's a place where Christians can practice and Christians are respected and the government is secular and provides protection. But it's not a pretty scene. - [Audience Member] Is Tunisia the same? - [James Zogby] There's almost no Christian community in Tunisia to speak of. The Christians who are in Tunisia are not Arab Christians. It would be French remnants from the French government. Yeah, to your time. - [Joan Kjaer] And here's one closing question. What US agencies or programs seem to be getting it right? - [James Zogby] Well, the one program I like the best is the program that started under the Bush administration and then got improved dramatically during Karen Hughes' last part in office and today has been accelerated even further in the Obama administration and that's the Middle East Partnership Initiative. Thousands of young kids get to come to America to go to school and/or visit and I get to visit with a lot of them when they come through Washington. It brings Arab kids from the high school level to the college level to the graduate school level to even folks in early career training. I love it. It's a great partnership effort that gives these kids life-changing opportunity. You know that picture of Bill Clinton shakin' hands with Jack Kennedy? That picture to me is a treasure, not because of Bill Clinton or even Jack Kennedy, but it's a reminder to me of events in my own life where some grown-up took me seriously or somebody gave me a chance to do something that I never thought I'd get a chance to do that stuck with me and made me feel, ahhhhh, there are possibilities in my life. I've met some of these kids, as I said, when they come through and I keep on a conversation with them and when they go back to Tunisia or Egypt or Oman and they keep writin' to me periodically about the lesson they learned or the thing they did or the opportunity that they had and it's given them a sense of the vision of possibilities in their own lives. They become very different people. And we do that for them. We do that for thousands and thousands of kids every year. That's the change we can help make. That's the contribution we make to change in the Arab world is giving kids the sense of possibility. And we do it. I think it's a program that I like very much so thank you all very much. - [Joan Kjaer] I have to give you something. - [James Zogby] Yeah. - [Joan Kjaer] So we've reached the end of today's program. You know that you've been listening to James Zogby and please remember that Prairie Lights Books is selling his book just outside the door. - [James Zogby] Let me just emphasize hat for a minute right here. This is not funny. No, seriously. This is my wife, my kid-- No. The book is back there for sale and if you can't I understand they're taking sign-ups for it and we'll figure out a way for me to get to sign 'em if you don't get 'em. But I very much hope you'll buy the book and I hope you enjoy it and if you read it and you have questions afterwards, email them to me and I'd be more than happy to take emails from anybody and respond to any questions ya still have. Thank you. - Great, and we also want to thank our partners. - [Joan Kjaer] Great, and we also want to thank our partners. University of Iowa's Honors Program, and New Pioneer Co-op. And James, please come close to me because I have a very special gift to give you. This is the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug and we hope that you will treasure it. - You took the word right out of my mouth. - [James Zogby] You took the word right out of my mouth. I will treasure it. - [Joan Kjaer] Good. - [James Zogby] I'd say keep it close to my heart Thank you. - [Joan Kjaer] Thank you so much. So once again we're at the end of the program and there are lots of guests in our audience today, if you have questions about joining the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, please talk to Sue Rolta at the table in the back. or via cable TV and want to send a tax deductible contribution you can call 319-335-0351 or send donations directly to the Foreign Relations Council 1111 University Capitol Center, Iowa City, 52242. So thank you very much for coming and thank you Dr. Zogby. - [James Zogby] Thank you.