[queequeger]

... I can't help myself. This is one of those articles that defines what a lot of people think. Now, most of my experience with arab culture is Iraqi, my knowledge of other arab cultures is more based on a few people I have met here and there. BUT!

...upposing that these people are basically Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless.

They do think vastly differently, no one can argue that. My favorite example is the rationale behind the attempt to bomb JFK airport, which was that because we americans loved Kennedy so much, we would become incensed with rage at seeing his namesake destroyed. While this would be true at bombing a mosque of your enemy's hero, we in the US don't really care that much.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization.

"We should hammer them to stop them from messing with our civilization." Sounds kind of like some other people's beliefs...

This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

This of course, is identical across cultures. Was this guy mad that his friend chose his immediate and extended family over him? We do the same things...

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY.
~snip~
Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion.
~snip~
On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member - if you convert to the One True Religion.

To say that their system of morals is phony because it's not yours... Here's the deal, Arabs don't assign much value to their work, it's a means to living. I think that's fucking fantastic. Arabs DO enjoy a romantic love, especially the Lebanese and Syrians... They can be as crazy about it as any Italian. Not all marriages are arranged, and this might come as a shock to you, but the arranged couples almost always fall in love with a bond just as strong as any westerner. They just go about it a different way.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, "If God wills it." A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, "It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah." Or, "I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah." (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, "You are all going to pass the exam, right?" "Inshallah teacher." "No, no!" I shouted, "No inshallah. Study!"

Ok, they have a hard time adapting to an infrastructure, just like any other 3rd world country. No shit, they can't figure out how to effectively maintain brand new and pretty much unintelligible equipment!? Crazy.

Oh, and it was at this point that I lost respect for the author entirely. Inshahallah does NOT fucking mean that. The palestinian was JOKING, and it's a very COMMON joke. Inshahallah is almost exclusively a way to signify future tense. I admit, it does take an ear for the language to discern when a person saying "I will meet you tomorrow Inshahallah" is simply saying he will meet you tomorrow, or if he's actually showing some amount of uncertainty. Of course, an Iraqi will always say "maybe" if it's uncertain.

This assclown started his article saying that all americans are linguistic idiots, and he makes the most common and idiotic mistake himself.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.

I call bullshit. Like I said, I have less knowledge of the Saudis, but I know the Iraqis and Levant Arabs have the philosophy of "If you think he's going to fight you, throw the first punch for the advantage."

7) In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.

This is the first thing in the article that's completely true. The language and culture has so much more extremeism. This was evident when American forces started rounding up clerics by the dozens for speaking about violence against the US. What they didn't understand is that no one in the mosque, including the Mullah, had any expectations of anyone doing anything.

8) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, and they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

...like "there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you."

Absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the West went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.) Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.

Hallelujah! Someone finally gets it. Maybe the fact that their culture is under constant attack (whether intentional or not) from western media and Ideals... maybe THAT'S what's frustrating those using violence, and they're using Islam as a justification.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

In the West, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their idea as "perfectly valid for them". Doesn't work that way for them; God's Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. I know, I know, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of enforcement in such detail as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.

So closing liquor stores on sundays, trying to get prayer in schools, etc. What he's not realizing here is that most Arabs DON'T want to control others. Most of the population of Saudi Arabia hates the religious police, and wants it gone. The only difference is that a) there is a larger number of religious nut jobs in the Arab world than in the western. If we had an increase of, say, 10% of the evangelicals in the US they would be so close to the majority our rights would start sliding out the window.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

I'll use Happy Monkey's views to summarize that section!

I realize this was super long, so if you read the whole thing... wow.
I would have avoided making such a long post, but these views are held by a very large number of people. Those people will go on thinking the same things, and say that I'm not a source to be trusted, but just maybe if they only needed one more drop of water to burst their dam....