Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

www Kato.org.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then Tom Palmer, senior fellow and director of

Cato University, may have a fighting chance at conquering a few Arab hearts and minds.

Since embarking on a mission to spread the ideas of liberty to the

Arab world, Tom has commissioned translations of writers ranging from Adam Smith to

Johann Norberg, lectured extensively in Arab countries, and launched Cato's Arabic website

Lamp of Liberty. Today he discusses his thoughts and progress with us.

Tom you've traveled to Middle Eastern countries including Iraq to lecture about freedom markets

and a constitutional government. Can you share some of your insights about the

travels? Well I think one thing is that there's a real hunger for knowledge about

how a free society functions and for how you can achieve the rule of law.

Many people who have been subjected to arbitrary government would like to live a normal life.

It was the kind of expression that was used in Eastern Europe at the end of the Soviet

Empire. People said, we want to have a normal society. And I think that there's a substantial

thirst for that in the Middle East as well where people have been subjected to

either dictatorship on the one hand and then the opposition has been sometimes

made up of a fanatical religious zealots and that's a very unappealing set of alternatives.

What explains the intellectual isolation of the Arab world?

It's a very interesting problem and I don't think we have a very good answer to that.

Certainly it's a mixture of things. One has been state

...