More about Mr. Alberto Fernandez of the State Department: MSNBC says he is the Voice of America....and how do we know what he is really saying on Al-Alzeera....Do we make tapes of every broadcast? It seems a man with this type of background wouldn't go around bad mouthing the US, but then again, that should be true of Gore, Clinton, Dean, Kerry, McDermott, and the cast of hundreds..... Fernandez's Bio is below this article from MSNBC and Newsweek....
Voice of America
In the Arab world, Alberto Fernandez has emerged as the best-known—and unexpectedly sassy—face of U.S. diplomacy
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Zvika Krieger
Newsweek
Updated: 9:58 a.m. PT Aug 29, 2006
Aug. 28, 2006 - Alberto Fernandez says he can't keep his mouth shut. "I'm Cuban," he says. "We can't close our big mouths. Cubans love to talk, love to argue, love to engage in repartee." His garrulousness might be a liability for an ordinary diplomat—but Fernandez is anything but ordinary. As one of the few genuinely fluent Arabic speakers at the U.S. State Department, Fernandez has become a one-man public diplomacy machine, appearing in Arabic media on almost a daily basis. Although most Americans have never heard of him, his rare linguistic skill, together with his trademark blend of compassion and sass, have made him the face of the United States in the Middle East.
On paper, at least, Fernandez's job is basically that of a high-powered booker, coordinating appearances of high-level State Department officials on Arab media. But in reality, he's the main act. According to his own conservative estimates, he has done about 200 interviews with Arabic media in the past year—with almost 60 media appearances in July alone. "As far as I am aware, he is the only Arabic speaker from the U.S. government who appears on Al-Jazeera says Abderrahim Foukara, managing editor at the network's Washington offices. "Sometimes we'll even have him on three or four days in a row."
More than being one of the few people qualified for the job, Fernandez is one of the few who are willing to take it on. After 9/11, most high-level U.S. leaders preferred not to spend time speaking directly to an Arab public they felt was hopelessly anti-American. Even among those who saw a value in public diplomacy, like Bush and Condoleezza Rice, many refused to appear on Al-Jazeera—despite it being the No. 1 satellite channel in the Arab world—in protest at what they deemed to be its biased coverage.
Fernandez isn't merely the only one who is doing it: he's doing it well, a dramatic change from U.S. government officials who usually have to limp along with a translator or fumble through prewritten talking points. "Alberto is good at going into heated, lively discussions, thinking on his feet," says Marc Lynch, a professor at Williams College and author of "Voices of the New Arab Public," a just-published book about Al-Jazeera. "He's not afraid to get emotional, he'll even lose his temper a bit, which is good on these types of programs."
By breaking from the stilted style of traditional U.S. diplomats, Fernandez is able to connect with his Arab audiences and at the same time to deliver a strong line on foreign policy. "If you are going to have a conversation for more than two minutes, you're going to run out of boiler-plate material from the morning telegram, so you have to go beyond the exact word of what the secretary of State said the day before," says William Rugh, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. "Alberto can do that in spades. He can personalize it, maybe throw in a quote from the Qur'an, use a lot more creativity in explaining American policy and attitudes."
Fernandez also isn't afraid to be blunt; in a recent interview on an Al-Jazeera talk show, Fernandez praised the "glorious history" of the Arab world—and in the same breath referred to Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and Mullah Omar as "mentally retarded." Fernandez sees clear differences between what he does and the job of State Department spokesmen like Sean McCormack. "They present policy, they are the oracles," Fernandez says. "My job is to engage audiences, to debate—the cut and thrust of intelligent discourse. 'How can you support such a stupid policy?' 'How can you live with yourself?' McCormack doesn't get asked those kinds of questions."
Arab audiences are responding well to Fernandez's human touch. "We hear it from people over and over again," Foukara says. "If someone addresses them in their native language, it resonates with them, because the person is making the statement, 'Hey guys, I respect you so much that I have bothered to learn your language'." But even beyond that, Foukara adds, "Alberto's personable nature is agreeable to people who sit back in the Arab world and watch him. And if you accept the person, you accept the message that that person is relaying to a certain extent."
Fernandez got his first taste of Arabic in the Army, but fell in love with the language as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, where he studied Arabic literature—"a sea whose depths you will never fully plumb," he says. To him, the late Syrian poet Mohammad al-Maghout was the "model of rebelliousness and truculent intelligence, much greater than any Syrian ruler. While we talk about democracy in the Middle East, he lived it in his bones."
After graduation, Fernandez enlisted in the Foreign Service. He was thrust into the spotlight in Nicaragua, where he was stationed as the embassy's press attaché from 1986 to 1988. "I was known enough to be attacked in the media. It was intoxicating," Fernandez said. Those were the peak years of the Sandinista regime, and Fernandez quickly learnt how to deal with a hostile audience. Playing on a derogatory slang word used for Cuban-Americans, the official Sandinista press would refer to him as "the maggot" whenever he was quoted. "After that, nothing in the Arab world that people could say could get to me."
At every posting, Fernandez has tried to build cultural bridges. He fondly recalls the job of organizing a Native American dance performance for an audience of 5,000 Syrians in the Allepo citadel. "I had to run into the souk and hire a herd of 40 donkeys to transport the props, including the sound equipment and a giant Native American totem pole," he says.
In Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, he initiated a "mullah exchange program," bringing local Islamic religious leaders to the United States to learn about American culture. The first group included the head of the revered Ulema Council, described by Fernandez as "a 7-foot-tall Pashtun guy who looked like Santa Claus." One particularly painful assignment, though, was his 2004 stint in Baghdad. "My time there was terrible because I wasn't with Iraqis," he says. "I was a prisoner in the Green Zone." So when he took over as director for public diplomacy for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs a year ago, he was itching for contact with the Arab people—and got more than he ever imagined.
Fernandez cherishes the freedom that goes with appearances on Arab media. The language barrier mostly protects him from partisan U.S. commentators and bloggers eager to pounce on every unguarded word from a Bush administration official. He's still surprised how minor comments get amplified when he does grant a rare English interview. Take the way right-wing pundits singled out one response from a 50-question live forum he did on the English-language Web site Islam Online. Fernandez referred to revivalist Sunni Muslim scholar Yusuf al Qaradawi—the founder of Islam Online—as "a respected scholar and religious leader worthy of the deepest respect." The National Review denounced Fernandez for being a "chic-sensitive" apologist "gushing over Qaradawi," who is banned from U.S. soil for his alleged links to terrorist groups. "It was just some BS answer, just to be polite, and they picked up on that one thing," says Fernandez.
Still, Fernandez gets praise from practically every other quarter. "Mr. Fernandez speaks to [Arabs] in their own language and tells them the truth," says former Israeli intelligence officer Yigal Carmon, who runs the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and translates Arabic media. "[The State Department is] lucky to have him—I haven't seen anyone like him in the past." James Zogby, founder and director of the Arab-American Institute, is equally impressed. "Alberto is one of those people who really cares—cares about the Arab world, cares about the relationships that he personally develops," says Zogby, who has hosted Fernandez on his Arab satellite television show "View Point" multiple times. "I don't hold him in anything but the highest regard." Still, the job can be tough—especially for someone as independent-minded as Fernandez. "I try to be faithful to the policy, I try to be faithful to myself, which is not always easy to do," he says. "There is an element of hypocrisy in any spokesperson's job. But you can be a parrot, or you can aim to be more than that."
Though his candor may get him in trouble with some right-wing critics, he believes that honest interactions with the Arab public are the only way to start improving America's image abroad. "Maybe [my critics] are ideological automatons, but I'm not," Fernandez said. "All I have to say is, thank God they don't speak Arabic."
URL: msnbc.msn.com
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IslamOnline.net hosted a live dialogue session with US State Department official Alberto Fernandez.
Below please read Mr. Alberto Fernandez's biography in full.
Alberto M. Fernandez became Director for Public Diplomacy for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in July 2005. He was previously Director of the Office of Iraq Affairs since July 2004. He was a member of the State Department’s 46th Senior Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute from 2003 to 2004. He has been to Iraq numerous times, most recently in June – July 2005.
A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Mr. Fernandez joined the United States Information Agency in 1983. He was a Junior Officer in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. From 1986 to 1988, he served as Press Attaché at the US Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua. In 1988, he transferred to the US Embassy in Kuwait to serve as Public Affairs Officer. He departed Kuwait on the eve of the Iraqi Invasion—August 1, 1990. He was then assigned to Washington DC, where he served as Country Affairs Officer for Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan in the USIA/NEA Area Office. After Advanced Arabic Training, he served as Public Affairs Counselor in Damascus, Syria (1993-96), Guatemala City, Guatemala (1996-99), Amman, Jordan (1999-2002), and Kabul, Afghanistan (2002-2003).
Mr. Fernandez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958 and arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1959. He served in the US Army and Reserves from 1976 to 1981. He studied Arabic at the Defense Language Institute-Foreign Language Center from 1976 to 1977. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1981 with a BA in Middle East Studies. In 1983, he obtained an MA in Middle East Studies from the University of Arizona.
Mr. Fernandez has received several departmental awards including a Superior Honor Award in 2003 for his work in Afghanistan, Senior Foreign Service Performance Pay for 2003, 2 Sustained Superior Performance Awards, several Group Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards and USIA’s Linguist of the Year Award for 1996. He is fluent in both Arabic (4/3+) and Spanish (5/5) and is an active member of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), presenting papers at annual conferences (1997, 2001). He has published in the Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society and the Newsletter of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.
He is married and has two sons.
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