A look at the divisions and unifying ideas of a region to which the West has committed considerable time, effort and treasure. Excerpted from “James Zogby: What Arab Voices Are Telling Us,” October 18, 2010.

JAMES ZOGBY, Founder and President, Arab American Institute; Advisor, Zogby International Polling Firm; Author, Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why It Matters

There are several reasons why I thought the book was important to write. One of them came through in a question today from one of the radio shows I did. The question was: “Why do we need to listen to these people anyway? What do they have to offer? They’re just backward and they’re violent and we just ought to ignore them.” The simple fact is we just can’t and we have not. We are so heavily invested in [the Arab] region. I put it this way: In the last 30 years we’ve sent more money, more troops, more weapons; we’ve fought more wars and lost more lives; we have more critical national interests in that region than any other region in the world. Every presidency since the 1970s has risen or fallen on its ability to manage conflict in the Middle East.

So it’s not a question of should we or shouldn’t we listen. We have to listen. The problem is we don’t. Let me add a couple of data points to that enormity of our interests in the region. I don’t just mean economic interests. We have 150,000 troops fighting in and around that area. We have not just Israel, which we always like to say is our number-one ally, but we have other countries in the region with which we have been closely allied and have long-standing ties and deep personal ties.

A year ago, we asked Americans to point to Iraq on a map. Only a third of those we asked could find it. After having lost a third of our troops, a third of our people know where the country is where 44,000 of our folks died. We asked people to give us the year of Israel’s independence, only about a third could do that. Two-thirds thought that Iraq and Pakistan were Arab countries.

We’re invested in the region, we’re dying in a region, we have interests at stake in a region but most of us don’t have a clue about that region. When I get the question, “All these people are violent, all these people are just religious fanatics. What do I need to know about them for?” The issue is that they’re not. They are like people everywhere, and we have to take time to understand that and that is something we have not done.

The fact is the news we get about the Middle East is always bad news. So the impression is that it is a bad-news place. The voices we do hear are the most extreme. It’s as if people in the Middle East were only to listen to Terry Jones, the wacko who was going to burn a Quran. If he defined America we’d be in trouble. But the fact is that we have the ability to broadcast a larger message about who we are. The Arab world doesn’t. So in this country, the voices that get heard are the angry ones, the actions that are seen are the murderous ones, and the whole region is therefore defined by stereotypes. Which explains the results we get when we poll Americans about the Middle East. When you ask favorability towards Muslims, among Democrats, it’s about 58/35, and among Republicans it’s 12 favorable, 85 unfavorable. Those are scary numbers about a deep partisan divide, in regard to a region that is critical, as General Petraeus says, to our national security interests.

[A third point] is this issue of the myths that dominate our national discussion about Arabs. They’re all angry; Why do Arabs not have a favorable attitude toward America?

What our polls tell us is that two-thirds of Americans think Arabs hate our values. So we looked at all of this and decided to do some polling in-depth in the region that would help open up a window, if you will, to let Arab voices in. We’ve been doing it now for about 10 years.

There is a book that we publish here in America that has been used as a standard guide to dealing with the Arab world. It’s called The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, and it had generalized conclusions about the Arabs, who they are and how they think. It was the book that led to Abu Ghraib by arguing that Arabs only understand humiliation, and overwhelming violence is necessary to change them and sexual humiliation is the worst form of degradation. The conclusions were there and played out in front of all of us with tragic consequences. The problem is that there is no Arab mind just like there is no Jewish mind. What there are are people that are diverse in and among themselves and in some cases have different attitudes at the same time toward similar events.

We talked to people in Morocco, Egypt and Lebanon, and in these talks the local customs in fact took shape. The history of Morocco is different than the history of Egypt, so there’s a different set of cultural values in each country. The local conditions create local uniqueness and I want the uniqueness to speak out, so we asked people about their own countries. What do you think about this? What is the most important thing about your own country? It really is quite striking when you see 4,000 Arabs given open ended questions.

I thought of something that Golda Meir said: “I feel bad for the other side. We over here, we make music and we make love and we have joy and they only know how to hate and make war.” That image of an angry people, that’s another image that we decided to take on: Are Arabs just angry? Part of the problem is that the only pictures we see are of people shaking their fists and demonstrations of Hamas or Hezbollah or something like that. I got the question today: “You say they like us, then why are they demonstrating all the time? Don’t they do things like normal people?” When we poll, we find that the number-one concern of all Arabs is their job and economic security. Number-two concern is health care, and number three concern is improving the educational system for their kids. Sound familiar? They’re like most people everywhere.

If Arabs aren’t all angry and are not all the same, then the other myth is that they’re all so different that they don’t really constitute a world at all. What we find in our polling is something quite different. Yes, they are unique cultures in different ways, and they have different kinds of backgrounds that play out in important ways in shaping them. But there are also some common threads that unite them as a people and those common threads are critical and cannot be ignored. When we ask people how they self-identify, Arab is near the top in their rating. But when we ask them if Arab identity is important to [them], it is to about 80-85 percent across the board. We ask them what it means to them. It’s a series of common and shared political concerns that fuse them to the rest of the polity in the region. When we asked Moroccans, “How important is the Palestine issue to you?” Or ask people in the Emirates, or ask people in Egypt or Lebanon or Jordan? It comes in the top ranking among 50 percent to two-thirds of the population. That’s important, and it’s a shared issue. It’s not a foreign policy question to them. It was something that was happening to them far away but speaking to their heart about themselves and about their vulnerability, and it’s a hurt. When America ignores it, we do so at great risk of making huge mistakes as we have continually made in that region. 

The last of the myths is this issue that Arabs don’t change. I use a story, it’s actually a poem from pre-Islamic times, and I call it the “Frozen Camel.” The poet describes a camel in the desert; the camel is running and the poet senses fear in the camel’s eyes. At one point the camel stops and the poet stops and he looks back and he is afraid of the danger that he has been running from. But as he looks forward, the poet notes fear again because he doesn’t know where he’s going. It’s a situation that’s not just true of the Arab world today but is true about everybody. It actually describes almost every critical period in history.

Now, in the Arab world the transformation is so rapid that it has caused this kind of insecurity in many ways. If you look at Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, the first time I went there was in the late 1970s, early ’80s. But if you think about, if you just went back 20 years before, in the ’50s, Riyadh had 45,000 people and it was mostly mud and brick. Today it has 4.5 million people and it works. To think that in just 60 years the rapidness of that transformation of this area into a metropolis with power and water and the arteries of transportation that actually move people in the right direction. It’s almost magical that it works. Abu Dhabi is the same thing, on a smaller scale. It was about 10,000 to 15,000 in the ’50s and today it’s a 1.5 million people. Now what happens in the context of that rapid change is some insecurity. If you want to understand the phenomenon of fundamentalism – the problem with fundamentalism in the South when you go back when you had movements of the sort that we had in the ’20s and ’30s after World War I, you had more urbanization. What that urbanization meant was that guys coming in from the farm moved into the city and reacted to the city’s ways and looked for a way to purify and be good solid Baptists, because that was the good way and these are the evil city ways. So you have this phenomenon of fundamentalism everywhere in the world. And change is coming; We asked people in Saudi Arabia how they feel about women in the workplace and about three-quarters say that they think it’s a good idea.

The book explores the myths, it tells some stories, and it talks about the interests and how we don’t know enough to meet those interests. We’re victims of our own ignorance in that regard, and because of our ignorance our leaders have been able to sell us a bill of goods. If you were a baseball player and had the same batting average as these guys, you wouldn’t be in the minor leagues; you’d be in jail for forfeiting contract.

I think there are areas of getting it right that need to be built upon.

I wasn’t always a fan of our A.R.D. [Agriculture and Rural Development] programs. But actually what began with Karen Hughes and I don’t want to take a lot of credit for it, but I think some of it came from a long conversation she and I had. Don’t give people what they don’t want. Give them what they are asking for, and let them in part define what sort of aid they want. It’s all like helping the little old lady across the street when she doesn’t want to go. See where she wants to go and then maybe offer her help.

We’ve changed our programs. Now our programs are actually partnerships. We ask people in the region what they want, and then we see if we can actually work with them. We find a local partner and we work with a local partner to promote the entrepreneurial training program.

I remember one of the things I did in the ’90s was called Builders for Peace with Vice President Gore. I was on the economic summit in Casablanca running the session on the Palestinian economy. We had three members from the Palestinian economy there and at the end of the program they were talking about what they needed to happen and the impediments to economic growth. Some guy comes up to me, he was a very young person, he basically had one job when he got out of school and that was working for A.I.D. [Agency for International Development], he did it for four years. So he came up to me and said, “I just got the $9.3 million contracts from A.I.D. to teach entrepreneurialism to Palestine in the West Bank, could I meet the ministers? I want to talk to them about what my plans are.” I told one of the ministers and he said, “What? That’s the aid they promised us. They never talked to us about this.” Basically the thing is, if you know Palestinians, they don’t need to be taught entrepreneurialism. You know, a couple nickels and they’ll do business with you. They wanted to free up the economic environment to do business, not have some kid who had never held a job in his life teach them how to be entrepreneurs. So now they’ve changed that, and it’s a good thing.

I have enormous respect for some of the U.S. corporations operating in the region that are actually some of the best public diplomats we have. One of the people I interview and write about in the book tells me, “We love your country. We sometimes don’t think your country loves us; we sometimes feel like jilted lovers a little bit, but the difference between you and Germany and Japan and China, the other great exporters, is they export products, but you export a way of life and people here want a piece of that.” Which is why they’ll go to a Starbucks, which is why they’ll go to McDonalds. Do they hate our way of life? No. They actually like it; they actually like us as people. But they don’t feel we like them and frankly, if you judge us not by what we say about ourselves but by what we’ve done, the record doesn’t speak well to how we have treated them.