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US Ad Campaign Gets Thumbs-Down From SE Asian Muslims
Patrick Goodenough
Pacific Rim Bureau Chief
In Indonesia and Malaysia, a State Department-funded series of mini-documentaries portraying the lives of Muslims in America is now airing on local television, and Washington has paid for the airtime as well.
The "Common Ground" series focuses on five Muslims, including a New York Fire Department paramedic whose parents migrated from Kashmir and an Indonesian graduate student in Missouri, who briefly tell their stories as Muslims living in the U.S.
The clips are accompanied by radio and newspaper advertisements, and they are a part of an initiative by the Council of American Muslims for Understanding, whose multi-lingual website is also being promoted on U.S. embassy sites.
The aim, says the State Department, is to help counter the misperceptions many Muslims have about the U.S.
U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, said last week the ads aim to highlight "the positive, common values shared by Muslims and non-Muslims, such as faith, family, community, education, charity, and tolerance."
But if early reaction is any indication, the target audience is less concerned about how Muslims live in the U.S. than about American policies - the war on terrorism, support for Israel, and the possibility of military action against Iraq.
An Islamist opposition lawmaker in Malaysia said Muslims had access to the Internet and Arabic satellite TV channels and were fully aware of the plight of their brethren in places like the Middle East and Chechnya.
It is Washington's foreign policy that upsets Muslims, not its domestic policies, a leader in the youth wing of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's UMNO party was quoted as saying.
In Indonesia, the editor of the Laksamana online news portal said many regarded the advertisements as "propaganda attempting to justify the Bush administration's planned invasion of Iraq and its ongoing support for Israel's repression of Palestinians."
The head of an association of Islamic scholars in the country said he doubted the effectiveness of a campaign designed "to change public opinion in the Muslim world, which is against U.S. views."
'Self-defeating'
Malaysia and Islam specialist Prof. Clive Kessler of the University of New South Wales in Sydney agreed Thursday that the advertisements were "not going down that well."
The U.S. clearly did need to engage meaningfully with Muslims as part of an effort to counter Islamism, he said, but the problem lay in the way it was going about this.
"The product is unattractive because it's a very unsubtle projection of America's interests and preferences," he said.
It was possible to sell a product like McDonalds or KFC to a foreign audience using American advertising methods, he said - although even that had to be adapted for local consumption.
But where much bigger ideas were at stake, "the promotion of U.S.-centric policies and measures in U.S.-centric ways is likely to be self-defeating."
Greg Fealy, an expert on Islam in Indonesia at the Australian National University, said Muslims in Southeast Asia and elsewhere were focusing on very different issues than the Muslim experience in America.
"These things are seen as superficial window-dressing - they're not seen as tackling the core issues."
Developments in the Middle East and the Gulf, and unhappiness about the West's war on terrorism were far more pressing to Indonesians and others.
After a terrorist bombing in Bali last month killed almost 200 people, Western governments turned up the pressure on Indonesia, prompting Jakarta to begin taking unprecedented steps against militants.
The U.S., Australia and other Western countries also issued travel warnings to their citizens, upsetting Southeast Asian governments, which said the warnings would have a severe effect on tourism.
"Those types of things have far more impact than portraying happy Muslims in America," Fealy said. "Their minds aren't really open to that message."
"In Indonesia especially, there's going to be great skepticism about this," he said, citing one of the conspiracy theories circulating in recent weeks.
"If they believe the Bali bombing was the work of the CIA, what credence are they going to give to some highly-packaged advertisement like this?"
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a recent briefing the $15 million campaign would be tested in a few countries first, mentioning Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan.
The department would "try to gauge the reaction, see how it's playing, figure out if there need to be changes in the plan, and then gradually go on to other markets."
"We're not going to wait for 20 years of opinion polling to see if we've changed attitudes, but we should be able to gauge some kind of reaction as we go forward."
Boucher acknowledged the U.S. was under no illusions that the campaign would stop suicide bombings, but said they were part of a broader program aimed at countering the view many Muslims had of the U.S. "based on distorted images and rumor and common belief that may not be true."
Final approval of the ads, he said, had been given by Charlotte Beers, the former Madison Avenue advertising executive who is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.
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