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Trump’s Middle East Communications Theater
Jared Kushner is out to tame Arab media
One of the key architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace efforts, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, has embarked on a frontal assault in one of the key Middle East battlefields, media communications. For someone who prides himself on being able to create a “business plan for the region,” Kushner is looking more like an undergraduate student in Business 101 class than someone seriously assembling a plan that can advance peace.
The McClatchyDC news agency recently broke a story that few other Western media outlets have found worthy to cover. Armed with U.S. citizens’ tax dollars and a stillborn economic plan, Kushner is deploying a data operation to sway Arab media on Middle East peace to make the U.S. case.
McClatchyDC journalist Michael Wilner wrote, “At Jared Kushner’s direction, U.S. government agencies have combined data tools and human expertise for the first time to officially rank Arab media outlets over their coverage of the Middle East peace process.”
In what seems like another ill-fated attempt to address the failure of his efforts to date, the latest being his Peace to Prosperity economic workshop in Bahrain, Kushner and company seem willing to go to any extreme to force-feed the Trump administration’s attempt to…
