The New York Review of Magazines

Hi

By Muna Shikaki

WHAT does a country do when its foreign policy is unpopular in a region in which it’s deeply involved? If that country is the United States and the region the Middle East, the answer seems to be launching a public relations campaign to capture the “hearts and minds” of the region’s youth and to show them what the “real America is like.”

Which is exactly what the State Department’s new magazine Hi says it wants to do. Conceived after September 11, Hi is a monthly lifestyle magazine published in Washington, D.C., in Arabic, and sold in more than fifteen Arab countries for a little more than $1. Hi targets eighteen-to-thirtyfive- year-old Arabs and is one of the State Department’s many ambitious new endeavors in media propaganda. Others involve setting up radio and television stations all over the Arab world. So, just when Arabs finally have an independent satellite news channel, Al- Jazeera, after decades of government-controlled media, they are hit with a barrage of new state-controlled media—delivered, ironically, by the country that trumpets its free press.

In a remarkable example of understatement, Ambassador Christopher Ross, the State Department’s special advisor on public diplomacy, told Al-Ahram Weekly, an Egyptian paper: “Since September 11, we’ve been seeing polls indicating that there was a certain amount of hostility toward the United States.” Ross, who was part of the team that launched Hi, told The Washington Post, “It’s good to get [Arab youths] in a dialogue while their opinions are not fully formed on matters large and small.”

The glossy magazine, printed in full color, carries articles on a wide variety of subjects that fall under two central categories: life in the United States, and the lives and experiences of Arab Americans and Arabs in the United States. Sports, celebrities, technology and the Internet are prominently featured, as are articles on how to get accepted by American universities. There is no mention, direct or indirect, of politics.

The magazine states that it is “published by an independent American company, The Magazine Group, with the help and encouragement of the U.S. Department of State.” That help translates to $4.2 million a year, and a review board that approves every article.

Since I fit the bill for the ideal reader (I am twenty-four and Arab), I thought I’d give the magazine a look. But Hi was so disappointing that I concluded that Administration officials must be high if they think it’s going to capture any hearts or minds.

The problem with the magazine lies not only in its premise, but also in its delivery. To the question “Why do they hate us?” (they being either Arabs or Muslims or extremists or terrorists, or any combination of the four), the answer Hi offers is that there is a homogeneous “Arab street” youth, a death-to- America-chanting group that does not know what U.S. culture really is. And if only they can learn what we are like, they will stop hating us. Hi is supposed to indoctrinate these masses with western culture and its way of life. “Anyone watching American movies and thinking that America is nothing but violence and sex is wrong,” Ross said. “And so we thought of explaining American life in a more accurate way.”

Here’s a reality check: Arab teens know more about America than Americans would like to believe. Egyptian and Asian movies are sometimes more violent than American movies; a lot of porn comes in Russian. No one, though, seems to chant, “Death to Russia.” It would have been a better idea for the magazine to accurately explain life in the United States, to present complex American issues rather than shy away from controversy.

In the February 2004 issue, for example, Hi includes an article on local elections in Roseville, Minnesota. Not once is the reader made aware of any of the issues the candidates debated, or any of the town’s particular dynamics. The article has the preachy tone of a sixth-grade civics textbook. In another example, an article on Native Americans neglects any mention of their historic plight as victims of European colonialists. This watering down of issues gives the magazine a lack of timeliness, angles, depth or focus. (And this comment comes from someone who is easily entertained by articles in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Allure).

Naturally, Hi has not gone unnoticed by the American and Arab press. Its launch presented a great opportunity to criticize one more Bush Administration mistake in the Middle East. From Washington’s Middle East Report to Cairo’s Al-Ahram, critics have torn the magazine apart. But one need not be a die-hard Bush-hating, administration-criticizing, cultural-relativist, anti-war, anti-globalization liberal to understand what they are saying.

Lambasting it both for its objectives and for its lack of political content, Elliot Colla and Chris Toensing of the Middle East Report wrote, “The pages of the inaugural three issues of Hi have been so airy that its creators ought to have called it High magazine.” Al- Ahram columnist Salama Ahmed Salama described Hi as “useless—just like Sawa [the U.S. government’s Arabic language radio station launched last year in the Middle East], since they both fail to answer important questions regarding the U.S. presence in Iraq and the U.S.’s Israeli-biased policies.”

The shame of it is that the magazine might have been effective as a tool of change if it had deigned to discuss the hot issues of the Arab world, such as Iraq, Palestine, the lack of democratization in the region, globalization and the rising role of religion. By dodging politics, the magazine turns potentially enlightening articles into bland space fillers.

In every issue, there are profiles of Americans who have lived in the Arab world and Arabs who have lived in the U.S. Both types tell the same story: The Arabs are always surprised by the tolerance and welcome they receive in America, and vice versa. If there exists such an abundance of cultural understanding and appreciation, one wonders what need there is for such a magazine?