What AreThe Arabs Saying About Us Today?
By Alan Caruba (12/29/03)
Oh, please, let’s not make the “Arabs” angry at us. What horrible things are being said about us in “the Arab street” today
I’m thinking these are the people who are responsible for the latest “high alert” to guard against another terror attack on America, the disruptions to domestic and international travel, and the continued attacks on our troops in Iraq. These are the people causing me and 280 million other Americans a lot of grief. Please note, however, the term “Arab” here refers to Muslim, not Christian Arabs.
Why do we keep hearing about how important it is to “reach out” to the Arabs and explain to them our good intentions when it is evident that (1) their bone-deep hatred of the West is immune to a rational response, (2) Arabs are the worst soldiers on the face of the earth, capable only of cowardly attacks that often involve killing themselves, and (3) the more we use our military power to suppress their worst instincts, the safer we are.
Our national security took a giant leap forward when Saddam Hussein and his regime was toppled and now it turns out that, as our military gathered to invade Iraq, Libya’s dictator, Muammar Khadaffi, was opening negotiations with US diplomats to end that nation’s program of WMDs. Are we safer now? You bet!
Too many Arabs were more concerned that Saddam Hussein was “humiliated” by his capture than the fact that he was a monster responsible for the deaths of millions of Muslims either through war with Iran and Kuwait, or the terror he waged against Iraqis and Kurds. Their hero was unmasked for the loathsome coward he truly was, thus losing his charisma as a Muslim “leader” who “stood up against” the terrible Americans who liberated Iraq.
Let it be said, however, that some Arab intellectuals do understand what is happening. Writing in the December 18 edition of the Saudi daily, Arab News, columnist Dr. Muhammad Al-Rasheed wrote, “The jubilation in Baghdad put the Arab media to shame. America, for this brief moment at least…is a liberator and not an occupier,” adding, “The reality we have to face is the fact that it took Americans to relieve Baghdad of its dictator. Arab impotence recorded a new low.”
Americans keep thinking that, if we can only demonstrate we are trying to help them, Arabs will love us. No, they won’t. For the Arabs, America and the Jews are the sole reason for all their problems. Sometimes I think the term “moderate Arab” is an oxymoron. Among those who attacked America on 9-11 were highly educated Saudis. Their education did nothing to deter them, nor did the time they spent among us, enjoying the freedom we extend to all our citizens and visitors. They still choose to kill themselves in order to kill more than 3,000 Americans.
Palestinians, who could have had their own nation in 1968, in 1979, at several points throughout the 1980s, and in 2000, rejected that opportunity in favor of continued attacks on Israeli civilians on buses, in restaurants, and anywhere else they could kill them. That decision has nothing to do with rationality and everything to do with the nutty notion that Allah will insure they prevail. The Arab “neighbors” of Israel made war on five separate occasions and were defeated every time. Egypt had to sue for peace just to get the Sinai Peninsula back. To end their attacks on Israeli civilians, Palestinians will be walled behind their enclaves because diplomacy has yielded only corpses.
In 1991, a US-led coalition drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait with little effort and, in 2003, we finished the job, arriving in Baghdad so swiftly most Americans were surprised at the lack of resistance offered. They shouldn’t have been. Within eight months, we had captured the dictator, Saddam Hussein, found hiding in a hole in the ground. In the previous year, we had driven most of the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
So now we have our troops where they can threaten the Syrian Arabs if they don’t behave, along with a growing number of military bases in many of the Arab nations of the region. Who are we afraid of? Certainly not these people! Writing about US troops in Iraq, Karl Zinsmeister, the Editor-in-Chief of The American Enterprise, says “These are the worst men imaginable to have as military enemies and the very best to surrender to.”
Let Arabs continue to say it is all an Anglo-American plot to control their oil. The mass graves of Saddam’s victims still cry out for justice. Throughout the Arab Middle East democracy and justice are still scarce quantities.
Yes, there continues to be a threat of terrorism, but after 9-11, there has not been a single incident with the exception of the use of anthrax that killed a few more innocent victims. We rolled up a terrorist cell in Lackawanna, NY, have some bad guys squared away in Guantanamo, and have passed legislation warning Syria to desist from sponsoring terrorist groups and to get out of Lebanon.
For too many Arabs it still doesn’t matter that US troops have gone in harm’s way to protect or liberate them. It doesn’t matter that we have sent billions in foreign aid to Egypt, Jordan, and now for the reconstruction of Iraq. It doesn’t matter that humanitarian organizations are eager to aid Iraqis. Recent Islamic targets have been the UN, erroneously seen to be in the control of the Americans and British, and, for inexplicable reasons, a Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad.
The Arabs’ fellow Muslims have blown up vacationers in Bali and tourists in Kenya, killed civilians in Moscow, assaulted compounds for foreigners living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, waged attacks in Morocco, Bombay, and Indonesia, murdered Jews in Turkey, and are broadening their attacks on Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe. They are the Muslims who hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. Oh, please, let’s not get them angry!
As far as the Arabs of the Middle East are concerned, the West is in their midst solely to get their oil. You know what? They’re right. You know what else? We in the West have spent billions of dollars to purchase their oil and you know what their “leaders” did with it? They built vast armies, none of which found any glory on the battlefield as Muslims fought Muslims, as was the case of the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. Let us not forget that Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was about oil!
When not spending millions on tanks and missiles, Arab “leaders” stole the oil riches that would have paid for an infrastructure to provide electricity and clean water. Iraq’s infrastructure, damaged during the Gulf War, had less priority than more palaces for Saddam. Arabs have the benefits of modernity without any of the benefits of freedom or human rights. Not one single church can be built in Saudi Arabia, but some two thousand mosques have been built in America! The treatment of Christians and other religions in Muslim nations is an offense to humanity.
Some small change toward democratic reform is occurring in Bahrain and other Middle Eastern nations, but not enough to make any Arab understand that radical Islam is the problem, not the answer. If you doubt this, you need only listen to the words of Osama bin Laden who has repeatedly said he is leading a religious war, declaring Islam incompatible with democracy. He’s wrong. Turkey, a Muslim state, long ago transformed itself into a secular, democratic nation when it took political power from its clerics.
It is not enough for the modern Arab to know how to use a cell phone or access the Internet. It is more important they understand these inventions are not intended to be weapons for the spread of Islamic terror.
Civilization is not about suicide-murderers. It is not about the subjugation of one half of the population because they are female. Slavery has been abolished in modern nations, but continues in some Muslim ones. It is not one-party government or passing leadership from father to son as in the case of Syria and what appears soon to be the case in Egypt. It is not enough to talk of tolerance. It is essential to actually practice tolerance.
When I think of Arabs, I think of their inordinate, arrogant, and obscene belief in their moral superiority. I think of their so-called leaders shouting insults at one another during their conferences. I think of the arrested adolescence they embrace in the name of Islam. I think of the Arab perversion of the concept of “honor” to justify rape, torture, war, and crimes against humanity.
Americans still haven’t a clue regarding the outlook of Middle Eastern Arabs and are continually astonished to find that it is more rooted in the seventh century than the twenty-first. What are the Arabs saying about us? Nothing that makes much sense.
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