>> good afternoon. welcome to the second annual gaithersburg book festival on such a beautiful day here in old town. is going to make the mayoral standard joke and say staff did a great job that i will not do that. my name is matt hopkins and i'm a planning architect. we are a trained city, so -- we are happy to have our trains coming through the middle of it. i also consider myself an expert, armchair political pundits so i'm truly excited to introduce our speaker. let me get right to our guess. gaithersburg proudly supports the arts and culture and we are pleased to bring it this event free of charge thanks to the support of our generous sponsors. couple of quick announcements for the consideration of our speaker and the guess around it, please silence any and all devices to make any noise whatsoever. we welcome c-span's booktv tonight and their viewers across the country. there is time during the presentation for audience questions. please make sure to use the

microphone in the center. the television audience can hear you comment after the presentation you can take a quick moment to fill out a survey. there is a much larger survey that came with your brochures and there is one on line for the rest of us who can't do anything in chart form. you can do it long form if you care to. dr. zogby will be signing books after his presentation. the need a copy, in the barnes & noble town. dr. zogby is attested clinical consent consultants lecture and recognize international policy expert and founder and president of the washington d.c.-based arab-american institute. he is a scholar on middle east issues and not unrelated to the book we are here to discuss today's senior analyst with for the polling firm zogby international. he writes a column that appears in 20 arab newspapers and hosts a weekly column discussion program on abu dhabi television in addition to a blog on "huffington post" and regular appearances on most network and cable news programs. as a member of the council on foreign relations and the

democratic national committee he is presented with the public service work by secretary of state powell in 2003 and served in the aclu nationally -- director and the national immigration forum as well and testifies before the house u.s. house, u.s. senate and the u.n. as well. he currently, and of course always less but never least a devoted husband and father of five. i am sure it has sharpened his conflict resolution skills, and dr. zogby is written a number of books most recently published the incredibly timely "arab voices" what they are to say to us, and why it matters. in the bright light of the unified spring i felt a strange personal convergence of events as they read this book and watch the protests in the streets of tunis, cairo and damascus. we try to understand history and we do try to divide into any areas and we are clearly sitting in the 11 exciting shift. arab voices again a chairman leslie timely book. at response to these dramatic

events with calm surveys and practical contemporary content shed light on believes all across the arab world and they are both surprising and familiar to me. arab voices searches out conversations between our initial assumption bring a range of perspectives across the arab world that have often been misunderstood or perhaps not heard it all. please join me in welcoming her zogby. [applause] >> thank you very much. i am not sure that the conflict resolution notion -- she is in charge. my wife is here and i am willing to say yes, dear. [laughter] thank you very much for hosting me. you know, when the gaithersburg oak festival first came to me it was back in november, early part of november. the book had just come out and i was at the national press club or their annual book fair. they invited me to calm. so much has changed since then

in the middle east. not only arab spring but lebanese government came and went and developments in the gulf as a result of increased oil revenues. obviously the changes in egypt and rebellions occurring across the region. but while so many things have changed there so little has changed here. and therefore i wouldn't write a change of words in the book that i wrote. actually the publisher is coming out with a book in paperback at the end of the year and asked me, do you want to redo anything? i said actually i don't. i will do an introduction that will bring it up to date. let the book stand. the arab world is a place we do not know and do not understand. and even with all the changes taking place there, we still don't understand. we are looking through a window, a darkened window and a world that is so important to us and

get a world we really don't have a clue in understanding how it operates. if you will look at it this way about the importance of the region, since the end of vietnam, we have sent more money and we have sent more weapons and we have sent more troops and we fought more wars and lost work lives in the middle east than anywhere in the world and every u.s. president, every u.s. president since jimmy carter has had his presidency defined success or failure, by how he performed in the middle east from the iranian hostage crisis until today. and yet with all that, our knowledge level is abysmally low. we have investments in the region that are, in terms of the importance they play in our overall economy, significant. it is not only a source of oil revenues but it is a free funneling of money back into u.s. treasury that underwrites

the dollar on the world market. the middle east plays a critical role in stabilizing our economy in the world. it is one place that doesn't drain money from us but rather invest money back in us. we have over 100,000 american business people businesspeople working in the region. the single largest place where americans work in a community in the middle east is in saudi arabia and the little city that looks like levittown on the persian gulf is quite a delightful little place, but you know when you see the little league world series in saudi arabia has a team and all the kids are blonde? no they are not saudi kids. they are little american kids who have names like davis and jones and frank and whatever, but they are americans and they lived there and they have been living there for decades. in a rather wonderful little place. with all of that, with all of the political capital that we have invested, just think of his presidency alone, how many

visits foreign leaders from middle east have made to america, how many times are secretary of state has been there, how much we have done in terms of trying to create peace, trying to deal with the problems that this administration inherited from the last. a war in iraq that has not won down and a war in afghanistan that we don't know where it is going. with all of that, when we pulled americans about the middle east, what we find is rather shocking. back in 2003, right around the time the iraq war started, "national geographic" pulled and asked americans to identify iraq on a map. 11% could do that. we did a poll last year. it skyrocketed to 37%. we lost 4500 young men and women in a country where only a little more than one third of our people could find it on a map. 60% of americans think iran is an arab country. it is not. 60% think pakistan is an arab

country. it is not. we don't even know in other words what an arab is or what an air of dissent. when we asked questions about islam, about the nature of the religion and about the culture again, the answers are rather shocking. now it is a fact that we don't understand a lot about a lot of places in the world. but we are not losing people there. and we are not expending political capital they are. and yeah it is true that yes, i mean japan is important but three times as many american kids study japanese that study arabic but we are not losing people in japan. more kids study ancient greek than study arabic and there is nobody dying in ancient greece. they were but i actually think they're all gone now. but the fact is that the importance of this region is such that we need to understand that and we don't. when we went into iraq in 2003, i remember having debates on television and debates in the

council on foreign relations and debates across the country with folks who are defending the war including those in the administration. the arguments they made indicated to me how little they understood. i mean the lies about iraq were not weapons of mass destruction. that was not the liar. the liar is it will be over in six months. the liar was that there was really no sectarian conflict, that it was just pop psychology. the liar was that there would be flowers in the streets and that we would be welcome as liberators and that a beacon would shine across the middle east of democracy, beginning in iraq and spreading everywhere. the liar was that we did not understand, but we pretended we understood iraqi history and iraqi culture and we sent young men and women to die in a place we did not understand at all. when you don't know a place, when you don't know a thing, when you don't know something

that is important, what you usually try to do is see it through a prism of something you do know. so you kind of say, it is really like this and you then you shift over to something. we saw iraq through the prism of world war ii. we had the sense that our young men and women walking down the streets of baghdad were in berlin liberating germany or we sought the prism of the end of the cold war. we were decapitating the dictator and people would celebrate and we would be heralded as the people in poland celebrated. we did not understand them and we did not understand how they viewed us and what they saw our role to be. i was talking to reporter at the time and said to him, he asked me -- he said, do you think this is going to improve our standing in the middle middle east? i said no. he said that we are liberating them. i said you are seeing it like germany that they are seeing us as the mongols. he said what do they have to do

with this? the simple fact is that the mongols were the first invaders of baghdad and they actually saw us as the new invaders. there had been the mongols that had conquered, there had been the british that they conquered and now they were us. the issue here is that if you were going to operate in the region, if we are going to invest and lose lives, and cost ourselves dearly and treasure, we at least ought to know the place we are going into and the fact is that we did not. we don't know because basically our educational system does not prepare us, and we have gone through reviews of textbooks that i've gone back to the 1970s. actually you go back to when i was a kid and some of you are my age and so you will recognize this, the history of civilization as we have studied it was a narrowly defined civilization. it actually started with stone age man and as i like to say the

stone age man actually in the book, the stone age man was from southern france. we know a little bit more today but the idea back then was that if there was a first man, it had to be in europe. god in his infinite wisdom would not possibly have gone elsewhere. africa, for god sakes no. it was the stone age man the first man in your. then we went to the greek and then to the romans and the holy roman empire and then we went to the dark ages we called it. we went to the renaissance and then the emergence of the nation-state in america. and that was the story as we saw it. we were the fulfillment of history. and nothing else matter. we were the sum total of it all. he reminded me of a muralist on the wall that the british foreign ministry. i was there with the book is number of months ago and the person from the ministry who brought me and said, i want to show you something. it is characteristic of this place and their history here in this because up to the top of

the steps there was a mural of victoria who was the symbol of britain sitting on a cloud, this naked woman sort of arms outstretched to the world. although they are not make it any more. they are prudish and i think if they had john ashcroft as a foreign minister they would have draped her something. she is there on the clouds, arms outstretched and on the other side of the mural is a black lash brown, yellow and red person holding trays of their wealth and gifted treasures all for victoria is the logo. that was the sense we had of our history and our world. the rest of the world did not count. they played no role at all. when they did play a role, it was china, marco polo discovered china. it was a mosque. he did not discover. the trade routes have been opened for hundreds of years before marco polo and it was the mongols who began moving civilization is to and west and

then columbus opened america and discovered it. again, not lost but the wealth of the treasures. if you think about it what were the italians eating before china and mexico came onto the scene? certainly spaghetti was not on the menu. the fact is that most of the cuisine that exists in southern europe, the mediterranean regions in central europe central europe comes from this mix of worlds that contributed to the very food we eat. and there was no dark ages in the world. what happened was the trade routes shifted from north of town. when trade routes shifted, wealth wealth went south in one well fled south so too did learning and development in sciences and art and architecture because that is where wealth was. so what happened was it wasn't like plato and aristotle got lost for the books got very don't need to be discovered for 500 years later. they have been translated into arabic and civilization, and of

the worst the development and advancement of learning stuff is that droughts move north and power move north, they moved with them as well. so what we call the renaissance is actually the movement of knowledge that had been north, moved south and north again. with all with the of the advances that had accrued. so we were in school and we were studying about -- his name was really abu rouged and when we were studying up with gina it was emphysema. it goes on and on. even the short stories and french are translations from the arabic. music, the baroque music comes from the the arabic aesthetic and islamic bees again so too much of dance and architecture and the advances in science and and forms of technology and architecture. all of those were south and moved north but we couldn't see it that way.

in the textbook, there is something about the arabs in the textbooks. but it was a picture of two guys on a camel in front of the pyramids. well, it was a little chapter, section, not even a whole chapter on data when life. that is what it was and that is all we knew. so what have we learned? we did and learned from school because it never was in our textbook. it wasn't there in the 60s were the 70s are in the 80's. as textbooks began to change in the '90s they were still inadequate. one of the middle east studies groups reviewed them. after 2000 chicago council on global affairs did a massive study of textbooks and found that kids asked all the right questions but the books did not have the answers and the teachers who had been educated with the looks that we studied with couldn't answer the questions the kid asks either. so we basically were engaged in a world asking questions about a

world that but we didn't have answers. unfortunately what happened was dancers began to be provided but began to be provided by people with an ax to grind. so when asked a question why do they hate us, the answer came back, because they hate us and they are haters and their religion is a religion of hate. if you listen to some of the networks that is about as intelligent as the conversation got. i to debate with somebody on "meet the press" that his argument was purely -- tim russert asked the question why did they hate us? the answer that he got was because they are taught to hate? why? because they hate us. that was really going to be instructive but that was what we were learning. and in popular culture was no better. we did studies of television and movies and what we found was that the main two images of arab were terrorists and oil shakes. now there are terrorists and their oil shakes, but they are not only by no means the

majority but an infinitesimal minority. would be told in the arab world we asked which culture is more violent t. know who they say is more violent? they say us because they look at columbine and they look at tucson and they look at the fact that we kill our own 18,000 a year with handguns which they -- it is safer today in cairo with all the upheaval that it is in miami beach. in terms of violent crime and murder. murder of that sort simply doesn't exist and yet we are massacring ourselves every year. they look at that in this they say americans are violent people. we are not that we look at them and we say they are a violent person. when he goes to his clinic and works among the poor he is not a story. but the story that we get is if he stressed the bomb on itself and he would be front-page news.

it reminds me of a guy a live next to in central pennsylvania. i had lived in philadelphia with my wife and we had one child at the time in philadelphia and then we moved when our second child was born. i was teaching in south-central pennsylvania. the guy next-door to be came over one day and he said, you lived there? i said, you mean here? no, no in philadelphia? i said, yeah. you lived there with your wife and your kids? i said yeah. weren't you afraid? i said well, no. he said, but they get murdered there every day. people are getting murdered. i said it is not true. is like self philadelphia and the lincoln drive and the community of quakers in chestnut hill. is a very diverse and very interesting city. he had none of it because he read in the newspaper every day somebody gets murdered in philadelphia. he saw on harrisburg television there was a murder in philadelphia today.

so all he could do is relate to the stories and he saw it playing out every day. now is the only stories we get about the arab world is violence, that is what is fixed in our heads. so popular culture reinforced by media culture creates a picture of a world that is the only world we now. and so our sense of who they are is skewed by what we see and learn and the result is we end up with an air of world based moran myth than on reality. as president obama said in cairo, what we need to do is look at the arabs as they are, not as we imagine them to be. and so i wrote the book to try to deal with some of the stereotypes and deal with some of the realities and away one of -- one of the ways i shatter the stereotypes is by actually pulling. my sense is that the best way to learn about who people are is to ask them. and take the information and respected and organize it and then present it. they learned about themselves and we learn about them.

when i pulling go to 4000 arabs from morocco to the gulf, and i asked them questions about their lives and about their aspirations and about their values and their attitudes towards a whole number of things including, and learned fascinating things. for example, do they hate us? the answer is, no they don't. more than 60% of their of have a favorable view of the american people. they don't like our policies though and they feel are policies make them think that we don't like them. actually a guy said to me it is not that we don't like you. we are convinced that you don't like us by the way you treat us. people don't judge you at the end of the day by what you say about yourself and how you behave toward them. and so, when we asked americans do irritate us, 80% said they do but 65% of arabs say they like or values of democracy and freedom and we are seeing that play out right now in the streets of the middle east. similarly, they like her education at like our

technology. they like our television programs. one of the thing that those fascinating to me was that when we started a tv network here and we have spent now almost three-quarters of a billion dollars on this tv station at this point, because we wanted to bring television programming, american television programming to the arab world. if you have spent anytime in the arab world, what you would know is they are to watch arab television. into some of our -- their favorite shows. they learn about is that way. you go to riyadh which is where i will be in about three or four days, and you stay in the hotel and the ground floor of the hotel is a shopping mall that has a saks fifth avenue and once i come a planet hollywood on the other side, starbucks in the middle, and mcdonald's across the street, a pizza hut the other way and you get the picture? kids walking through the mall wearing jeans and basketball jerseys with american basketball

player names and chicago white sox or new york yankee hats. i don't know why they don't wear anybody else's but they like those. they are kind of cool. our culture has become universal and people like you. they want a little piece of us and it is something we don't understand or something we don't relate to as we ought to. similarly when we asked them what they want in their lives, they want jobs and they want improved health care and they want education. sound familiar? it is like us. there really is no difference, difference in that regard so this notion that we have is the arabs go to bed at night hating americans and spend the day in a mosque learning to hate more or watch al-jazeera and getting inflamed by the news, this is not true. they go to bed at night thinking about their jobs and wake up in the morning worried about their kids and whether their folks will get the health care they need. and when they watch television

they are not watching al-jazeera. intimately their mosque attended rates are equal to church attendance rates here interestingly enough. when they watch television for number one shows they watch her movies. after that are soap operas and dramas and on down the line. i was in the middle east -- like i don't know if you saw the other day the picture in "the new york times" a president obama speech in the pictures of a coffee shop in cairo in the television is on and the picture is there a president obama speaking. the guy said 10 minutes into the speech, they turned it off and said turn it to a movie. they are not consumed with us. we sometimes might be with them although i wish we were a little bit more and to take the time to learn about them, but the fact is that -- i was in riyadh during the uprising in tunisia when it was just starting and the government of lebanon was falling. we were flipping back and forth in in the guise living room. there were about 18 of the

senate went from al-jazeera on the left to a lefty on the right. they have a different attitude towards television and newspapers there. they know that their newspapers are not objective and they know that their televisions aren't objective so they watch different ones to get different views figuring some place in the middle is the truth. we on the other hand believe in our arrogance that everyone of our networks are absolutely -- is the best clinical game on television or fair and balanced. if one of our networks and their newspapers claimed to be pure objective truth and they are not. they are just not. actually there is no such thing in journalism. the reporter by a subjective nature is going to introduce an element that if you are honest about it, at least then you get the sense that, watch my view and listen to his view and maybe someplace in the middle eakin figured out. they are going back and forth debating whether or where he was right or whether the two nations on the street were right or ben

ali was right. it is pretty intense and all of a sudden a 28-year-old son of one of the guys comes in the room and says it is on. he goes and gets the remote control and he puts on arabs have got talent, which is kind of a gimmick version of "american idol" that is really cool. one of the big shows in the region is who wants to be a millionaire? the guy wears the same sort of weird shirts and ties, the matching shirts and ties and it is the same thing. you have lifelines and all that stuff. it is a big show. arabs got talent is a bigger show right now. they watch television to be entertained. the debate got as hot and heavy over that as it did over the tunisia and lebanon situation. so the fact is that the stereotypes are wrong. they are not an angry people. they aren't all the same. they don't all have the same attitudes towards us or towards

their lives. they are real people wanting real things in their lives and they want their lives to get better. they are actually making changes right now. this is not a region that is stuck. it is a reason that is moving forward in trying to change. i'm afraid sometimes that they are changing but we are not. we are not in our attitude toward them or in our understanding either. so the book is one that i would rewrite. i match up out of the fact that i think i got it right the first time and it just needs to be updated in terms of reviewing the last six months in telling the story as it has unfolded. but we have too many instances of situations developing here which concerned me. so, for example, when we pulled 11 years ago and asked the question, do you know enough or do you need to know more about the arab world, 75% of americans would say i don't know enough and i need to know more. that was healthy. but when we poll today and we get just a little over 50%

saying they know, that they need to know more, that is getting dangerous. and it has become a partisan split. 73% of democrats say i don't know enough that i need to know more. 80% of republicans say i know enough and i don't need to know more. that worries me. what it says to me is that people are getting locked into attitudes and the attitudes they are locked into if you look at them, break them out, this is a culture that hates, this is a culture that is angry and this is a culture -- not all of the stereotypes playing out with 80% saying i know enough and i don't need to know more. the fact is that we do. and so my sense is that it is important. it is important that we listen and importantly understand because we can't change our relationship with that region unless they understand its people. we can improve our ties and get ourselves out of the hot water we are in and get them out of the hot water that they are and in their relationship with us unless we learn to listen.

i think i will stop there because i'm running out of time but i do want to get some questions and have a feeling some of you would like to do that so thank you very thank you very much. a bit lucky to get the book and we will talk about it now and then later on when i am doing some signings. thank you go. [applause] >> a couple of months ago and "vanity fair" they had a beautiful photo spread of all these really cool young egyptians who helped the revolution and i think it is fair to say that arabs don't have a real good image in this country. i wondered if you have any had any sense that their image is improving because of what is happening in tunisia and egypt? >> i would like to think so but i'm not sure yet. we brought a number of those wonderful young people here. my institute did didn't toward them around the country. i got to spend a little time with a number of them. they are really quite wonderful and quite -- he who has become

known as the google guy and he resents it actually. just a very bright and very caring person. we actually talked about that. me and my conversations with a group of them who came. and, i think that to the degree to which attitudes have improved, if they have, they are derivative of the fact that the news itself is positive, but as the news changes attitudes will go back to where they were. i used the example of polling that we did with mahmoud abbas when he was first elected president of palestine. his favorable rating at the time was 53% and his unfavorable was 17%. and it was because of the fact that george bush like him, that he wasn't a yasser arafat and debit rats and the senate like tim too. john kerry said good things. he was not arafat was the big

thing so is positive attitude toward derivative of what he wasn't and if who like tim. but nobody knew him. i wrote him a note at the time and i said this will change in a heartbeat if people don't get to know you for yourself. p. did nothing and so when we pulled last year his favorable rating had gone down to 19 and in his unfavorable rating hit climbed to 51%. what that means, he didn't deserve the 53 positive. he also didn't deserve the 51 negative. he didn't do anything. but the public mood when you don't know ships with events and with other characteristics that shape attitudes. today i may get a positive number about egypt but i will tell you that if the news changes, the numbers will go back because people still don't know. i told these young folks as much as you do there you really need to spend some time to do some work here which is why we brought them and got them around the country and won't the folks to know them at little bit more

so that attitudes could begin to be shaped by them and not by the fence surrounding them. okay? yes. >> i will talk very loud. >> c-span won't pick you up. i know that everybody wants to hear the question because i'm not going to repeat it. i will get it wrong. you made it. >> i did. i'm fascinated by what you had to say, and being a former history teacher in high school i was thinking to myself, here is some history that would really make a difference and would be exciting for kids to learn and it is not a bunch of dates. but how do you get into the school system or is that not the next step? what is the next that? >> georgetown university is a program for teachers. they have invited me to come and meet with their teachers and actually they are getting the book. we are also marketing it to

schools. when i wrote the book, that was one idea i had in mind was that this was the book for kids. and for high school. is also a book for college in a book for grown-ups. it is a book for us, written for america and americans about what we don't know in what we need to know and why it is important for us to do it. so ian and if you have a school in mind let me know and i would be happy to get my publisher to send them copies. >> i might get back to you. >> thank you. >> anything more? yes? >> you moved ahead to the next 10 years where -- in the u.s. and in the arab world. do you tend to be upbeat or

downbeat or is it too soon to tell? if you were to come back and give this talk 10 years from now, what would you thus be? >> to tell you the honest truth, i am worried. i am worried about the direction we are moving in and i'm worried about where the balance is between those who get it and want to get it right and those who just don't. i was shocked last year when they park 51 crisis erupted or the controversy erupted across the country. i was shocked when i saw the cnn piece on murphy's borough and the mosques there. this islamaphobia is striking and disturbing. we have a situation today where we have a president who is trying to get it right at but who is facing obstacles that are enormous in terms of a public and a congress in both parties. this simply won't let him get it

right. his speech at the state department, i was there and i heard it and i said when it was done, he said this is nice but there was nothing new in and there really wasn't. there really wasn't. but the yells and the screaming about he betrayed our allies and he threw israel under the bus. every republican opponent from 2000 poe began to abuse him and there are going to be resolutions introduced in the house in the senate to denounce the president for throwing israel under the bus because he set the starting point of negotiations is the pre-67 borders which is what george bush said when he said the starting point of the negotiations as the 1949 armistice line which it is -- incident lays the pre-67 border but george bush said in an everybody was quiet. barack obama said it and it was whoops and yells and screams. my sense is that we are a dysfunctional political system today. and because we are so

dysfunctional, we can't have a reasonable debate. the fact is that their fight for democracy in the middle east, they're fighting to have free and open debate in the middle east and we can't have one here in congress. on the very issues i'm writing a book about. so i would like to see change. i just don't think it can happen yet. yet that is what the challenge before us is. to educate ourselves to be sure but once we educate ourselves it is to take advantage of that education and fight for change. how many of us know, even know what position are congressman has taken or congresswoman has taken on the key issues involving the middle east? you can check out my web site and find out that but i find it disturbing that if you think about the lives we have lost and think about the treasures that we have lost and think about how much is at risk facing america in the middle east, and how little attention we pay to how our congressmen or women vote on these issues, you get a sense of the fact that they are just free

to roam and run, and so by the book, read the book but also pay attention to politics and help us make change. it is absolutely desperate and i'm out of time and i thank you all very much. [applause] >> thank you for coming. i want to remind you that doctor zogby will be signing in the autographing area to my left into your right. thank you again for coming to the festival. festival. please fill in the survey to be eligible to win a the reader and the caller. we will continue with the panel discussion on the hook industry in a minute. thank you. ..

here i have discovered the truth. >> to be the truth. >> well, it says -- yeah. [laughter] but the love of truth is the spirit of man. given where i was and for how long i was there, this is incredible, i have no business at all being here now. >> that is absolutely correct. >> now, you say that you were in jail 40-something years.

what do you mean by that? >> well, i was in jail 47 years. the fact that we are born into a prison, actually, when we're born, we're born as perfect beings. perfect means complete with all of our possibilities intact. but we're also born into a world of sleeping people, the level of unconscious human insanity where hate and wars and death and destruction and inequality reign supreme. so we are actually born into a prison. so i was in the, i was in that prison for the first 40 years of my life until i was able to wake up and get out of that prison. and realize who i really am. >> well, let's come to who you really are in a second, but let's just for the viewers' sake say that you were actually incarcerated in prison for about 20 years, 1964 or