Alberto Fernandez is one of one-or-two US Department of State officials who can speak Arabic on Arab TV stations. His Arabic has improved in the last few years; hell, he had to. But for the life of me I dont understand why he never bothered to learn those quintessential Arabic letters/sounds: "h" (as in Hummus or Himar) and "`ayn" as in As`ad. So he was paired on AlJazeera's Ittijah Al-Mu`akis with Lebanese Nasserist buffoon, Kamal Shatila, who can be quite entertaining and funny. Now it is not good for your reputation if you are defeated in a debate by a buffoon, and Shatila won the debate hands down. And Fernandez should have been more prepared. He did not even know anything about Shatila. He just assumed that he must be one of the pro-Syrian politicians in Lebanon. So twice Fernandez referred to "your masters" in Syria or words to that effect. Shatila had to remind him that he was banished from Lebanon for more than 15 years by the Syrian regime, and that the US government did not utter a word of protest at the time. In fact, the Syrian regime was planning on killing Shatila (he had double dealing with the House of Saud, and was accused by the Syrian regime of leaking minutes of a meeting of the Ba`th High Command to Al-Hawadith magazine) and former Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlas, called him to tell him to flee for his life. Rafiq Hariri was quite happy to see him exiled as he enjoyed how the Syrian government was exiling or persecuting his Sunni rivals. So the audience knew about Shatila's background and the history of Syrian persecution of him, but Fernandez did not know. The debate was about "the New Middle East" that the US is promising. 95% of AlJazeera's viewers said (in an on-line poll) that the American "new Middle East" will only mean more destruction and devastation, while only 4% believed that it will mean more prosperity and welfare. The host told Fernandez that people in the region speak about Ash-Sharq Al-Awsakh, when talking about US plans, as opposed to Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat (The Filthiest East as opposed to the Middle East). I must confess that Fernandez distanced himself from several policies of the US government.