Transcript
AMBASSADOR SCHNEIDER: Today, when the divide between the U.S. and Muslim World presents one of our greatest foreign policy challenges, leaders from Secretary Gates on down are recognizing the limitations of military power and the need to enhance diplomacy and engagement with other cultures. Within that context, arts and culture has untapped potential as a component of the engagement between the U.S. and Muslim World. This is because, number one, of the power of creative expression to tap into our emotions and to move us and to shape and reveal identities.
It is also true that funding for arts and culture engagement with the Muslim World, sadly, does not begin to take advantage of this potential. In fact, funding from the public sector, from the government, for worldwide cultural engagement –- this is not university exchanges, but sheer cultural engagement –- is only around $11 million. From private philanthropy, at a time when overall numbers have increased, the amount of money that we could figure out that goes to arts and cultural engagement with the Middle East is about 1/10th of 1 percent. At the same time, the unique U.S. ability to create successful commercial culture represents an asset that is not at all, sadly, being strategically deployed.
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