WASHINGTON: When George W. Bush asked the rhetorical question: “Why do they hate us?” when referring to the Middle East, the following may be a clue.

Al-Hurra TV, which broadcasts in Arabic to the Middle East, has chosen Tom Dine, the former director of the pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to be their consultant.

“It shows astonishing stupidity and insensitivity on the part of whoever is responsible for naming him,” said a State Department diplomat, anonymously, who deals with the Middle East. “They clearly didn’t do their homework, unless their intention is to insult the Arab world — because everyone knows what AIPAC is — it’s viewed as being hostile to Israel-Palestinian peace and is despised in the Arab world. “The only good thing is that no one listens to Al-Hurra,” said the diplomat in a phone interview.

“Al-Hurra is really quite awful and doesn’t have any credibility. Everybody knows that Al-Hurra is the US government. So the question is why anyone would want to watch it when they can watch Al-Jazeera, especially when Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have US officials on their shows all the time.”

Al-Hurra, set up under former President Bush to broadcast an American perspective of the US foreign policy in the Middle East, was the subject of a joint investigation last year by ProPublica and CBS’ 60 Minutes. The investigation revealed serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and long-standing concerns inside the US government and Congress regarding Al-Hurra’s content, which led to congressional inquiries in the House and Senate.

The station has cost US taxpayers more than $600 million since it began broadcasting in 2004.

Attempting to address some issues in the last year by tackling financial and accounting procedures, Al-Hurra’s president, Brian Conniff, recently met with congressional investigators and hired Tom Dine as a consultant. Dine, former head of Radio Free Europe and head of AIPAC from 1980-1983, is currently senior policy adviser at the Israel Policy Forum, IPF.

Dine recently said in an interview with ProPublica that his enthusiasm for international broadcasting and his knowledge of the Middle East would help him promote the network on Capitol Hill and within the Obama administration.

But results from the largest public opinion poll in the Arab world indicate that Al-Hurra is the least favorite channel in the region overall and is losing viewers. The poll, published in May by the University of Maryland and Zogby International, showed Alhurra with about a 0.5 percent audience preference across the Arab world’s largest and most-influential countries.

Shibley Telhami, a leading Middle East expert at the University of Maryland and The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said Al-Hurra’s rating was so low that, for the first time, it fell below the poll’s margin of error.

Well, maybe Dine’s appointment will help Al-Hurra see an increase of viewers... in Israel - noted a sarcastic Al Kamen in Friday’s Washington Post.