Cairo – The State Department’s top public-relations official praised an Egyptian educator and his school Sunday for the courage to speak out against terrorism.
Karen Hughes, President Bush’s confidante since he was Texas governor, visited Sunni Islam’s most prestigious seat of learning, Al-Azhar, singling out its head, Sheik Mohammed Say yed Tantawi, for praise.
Al-Azhar was one of the first religious institutions in Egypt to condemn the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“The reason that I choose this meeting as my first meeting on my first trip to the Middle East is to talk about the courage of this institution,” said Hughes, now U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. “I praised Sheik Tantawi for his courage, and he said it is not courage but I did the right thing to speak out against terrorism and extremism.”
At Hughes’ swearing-in Sept. 9, Bush said her job will be “to improve our government’s capabilities to confront terrorist propaganda quickly before myths have time to take root in the hearts and minds of people across the world.”
Accompanied by Dina Powell, an Egyptian-American recently named assistant secretary of state for promoting educational and cultural exchange, Hughes met with Egyptian students in a multi-country trip meant to push for “interfaith dialogue” as a tool to bridge the gap between the United States and the Middle East.
Hughes will also visit Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
But the editor in chief of Egypt’s pro-government al-Gomhouria newspaper said in today’s edition that Hughes’ trip to the Middle East would fail.
Enmity in the Arab world for the United States is because of its policies, and “makeup won’t work,” Mohammed Ali Ibrahim wrote in a column titled “An American face-lift in Cairo.”
The United States has tried reaching out directly to Arabs in other ways, most recently through the Arabic-language Satellite network Al-Hurra, Radio Sawa and a slick Arabic-English magazine, “hi,” which shies away from politics to inform the Arab world of U.S. culture and life.
None of the three appears to be widely popular.
