Monday, June 26, 2006
An Embarrassing Truth
Nouri Lumendifi of The Moor Next Door gives some thoughts on China's diplomacy with the Arab speaking world versus that same diplomacy conducted by the United States:
The United States has grown consistently less and less proficient at producing students who are even capable of speaking correct English, let alone those who have sufficiently mastered a second or third language.
Of course we are losing the battle for Arab diplomacy. There are surely a vast array of technical arenas where we are being outperformed because we can't directly communicate with the native people.
The education system in the United States is pitiful, and until we can elect an administration who has the gumption to revamp the department, and who will refuse to allow inefficient management and sub-par standards; we will continue to suffer these embarrassing inadequacies.
It is not surprising that Sherif Hamdy can write in the Daily Star that China is getting close to beating out the United States in the arena of public relations in the Arab World. I have seen maybe one or two American officials speak Arabic on Al Jazeera or Al Arabiyya regularly, and, according to the Government accountability office (via Foreign Policy Magazine's blog and Kirk H. Sowell), only about 30% of American diplomatic personel in the Muslim world have proficancy in their host country's language. At the US embassies in almost every Arabic speaking country I have visited (Algeria, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Lebanon), I have met US personel who struggled to communicate in Arabic, and in some I heard not one word of the language aside from "Salaam" or "Ahlan".What is sad is the reality of these observations.
The United States has grown consistently less and less proficient at producing students who are even capable of speaking correct English, let alone those who have sufficiently mastered a second or third language.
Of course we are losing the battle for Arab diplomacy. There are surely a vast array of technical arenas where we are being outperformed because we can't directly communicate with the native people.
The education system in the United States is pitiful, and until we can elect an administration who has the gumption to revamp the department, and who will refuse to allow inefficient management and sub-par standards; we will continue to suffer these embarrassing inadequacies.
