The images are jarring, the hypocrisies appalling, the rhetoric repulsive. Only in the Arab Middle East — and the Islamic world in general — are suicide-murderers operating and indeed canonized, even blessed with cash bonuses. An inveterate liar like Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is lauded for his defense of a mass killer like Saddam Hussein — and at last lampooned not on moral grounds, but because his yarns about thousands of dead Marines are finally exposed by the sound of American tanks rumbling his way. The last gassings in the modern world — Nasser's in Yemen and Saddam's in Kurdistan and Iran — were all Mideastern; so are promises of virgins in exchange for bombing women and children.

Pick up any newspaper and the day's bombings, killings, and terror are most likely to have occurred somewhere in the Islamic world. The big, silly lie — Jews caused 9/11, the U.S. used atomic weapons against Iraq, Americans bombed mosques — has been a staple of Middle East popular culture. The hatred of Jews is open, unapologetic, and mostly unrivaled on the world stage since the Third Reich.[...]