WASHINGTON Ñ The United States today opened a conference involving leading foreign experts
to discuss anti-American sentiment throughout the world.
U.S. officials said the two-day conference began in Washington on
Thursday. They said the parley, organized by the State Department, will
contain 50 U.S. officials as well as 20 scholars from the United States and
abroad.
The department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research has organized
several such conferences as part of a dialogue with non-governmental
specialists on anti-American sentiments in Europe, the former Soviet and the
Islamic world. Officials said the conference will be closed to the media and
public, Middle East Newsline reported.
"Their purpose is to sort of explore the various manifestations and the
roots and the reasons, and to make it improve the
quality of their product and their explanation, their analysis for the
secretary and the rest of the people who use their analysis within the U.S.
government," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "They were
quite aware of the phenomenon, and they wanted to explore it in more detail
and understand it in more detail."
The conference will include the British author Salman Rushdie.
Officials said the effort began after the Al Qaida suicide attacks on
New York and Washington, which were followed by anti-U.S. demonstrations in
Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Riyad and Manama. They said that since then the
State Department has sent Arabic-speaking envoys to speak to the Arab media.
"Those of us who do work in public affairs and public diplomacy need to
understand the environment we're working in, the sources and the causes and
the reasons that people don't like us in some places, if we're going to
counteract that," Boucher said.
