U.S. State Dept. hires team to post on Arabic message boards w/pro-American messages

At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate


By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: September 22, 2007

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.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/washington/22bloggers.html?ref=middleeast

and Blackwater mercenaries.

to figure out how this will turn out. I imagine that they will be noticed and ridiculed much like a freeper on any progressive board.

something he/she's not. They have a stunningly incomplete grasp of the "other's" world.

they won't feel the urge to muck around posting lies on the message boards of people in other countries, trying to trick them into thinking better of them than they should.

That's the problem with propaganda. It completely, crudely, viciously disrepects people, while proceeding with the view that all that matters is that you can control others by controlling the information they use to form their beliefs.

boards, as in DU! it is called PROPOGANDA!

Funding and manpower to actually help people? Not so much.