When the State Department Tries to Choose Muslim Thought Leaders to Win “Hearts and Minds”

Few things produce darker and more warped comedythan when the U.S. government launches new propaganda campaigns to “win the hearts and minds of Muslims.” Remember when George W. Bush dispatched his longtime political aide, Texas’ Karen Hughes, to the Middle East as a State Department official to change Muslim perceptions of the U.S. andthat promptly (and predictably) resulted, asSlateput it, in a “jaw-dropping display of ignorance and malapropism that made her the laughing stock of the region...