Excerpts:

Last month, speaking at the Army War College, Donald Rumsfeld said, "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a ‘D’ or a ‘D-plus’ as a country as to how well we’re doing in the battle of ideas that’s taking place in the world."

The problem isn’t so much, as Rumsfeld claimed in another recent speech, that Bin Laden and al-Qaida spread their ideas through mass media more skillfully than we do. The problem is that to the rest of the world, we appear to have no ideas at all.

Juan Cole, a blogger and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, has come up with an intriguing idea for how to fill this gap. He wants to hire skilled linguists to translate into Arabic the classic works of American political thought—especially those works that deal with freedom of religion, division of powers, sovereignty of the people, and equal rights. He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

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The anti-American MSM not only in America but the rest of the world, continuously adds to the negative view of America. It’s going to take more than a few dozen translated books to change peoples minds. Perhaps they need to work on changing/educating the MSM’s mind-set instead.