Voice of America Arabic Section : Comment by Dr Godlas

Colleagues, This message is a bit of a stretch as far as its remote connection to Islam, but since the Voice of America, Arabic section, does represent to a certain degree American's outreach to the Arab world, I thought it might be of interest to some of you. I was appalled at the poor quality of the current home page for the Arabic edition of the Voice of America page. http://www1.voanews.com/arabic/index.cfm? But I suppose one reason for its poor quality was the launch of Radio Sawa http://www.radiosawa.com/ , which appears to be VOA Arabic, according to the article title "Voice of America?" in *Accuracy in the Media* by Paul Weyrich (August 2004) http://www.aim.org/guest_column/1899_0_6_0_C . (Note that the main VOA page does not lead to Radio Sawa but rather to the miserable VOA Arabic url that I noted originally.) Speaking of VOA, does anyone besides myself and certain al-Qaeda members see the ominous connections between three of the cute banner icons (gifs) on the old version of the Voice of America Arabic website? http://web.archive.org/web/20031204192835/http://www.voanews.com/arabic/ The icons to which I am referring are "Tasrihat al-bayt al-abyad," "Tasrihat al-bintajun," and especially "Visiting the USA." The only icon missing is the twin towers. (I breathed a paranoiac's sigh of relief when after a quick look on the internet archive http://web.archive.org --i.e. the "Wayback machine," which by the way is the best tool for finding webpages that have gone offline-- I saw that the icon for "Visiting the USA" does not appear to have been used before Sept. 11; and furthermore, since its url http://www.voanews.com/mediastore/voa_visitusa_220_17june03.gif , that seems to indicate it was made in June 03.) So the conjunction of those three icons appears to be just one of life's wierd coincidences. I just realized that the tone of this message really makes it more suitable for a BLOG. So I will probably start one for myself and would like to provide links to other BLOGS of Islamic Studies profs (and those of Islamic Studies grad. students as well), of which Juan Cole's is the best example I know. So if you have your own BLOG, please email me the url. Or if you would like to start your own BLOG and don't know how to do it, please feel free to email me. It is simple, free, and much easier than creating your own web site. Alan ************************* Dr. Alan Godlas Dept. of Religion University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602-1625 http://www.uga.edu/islam