Andrew Sullivan points to two items of interest. The first is this editorial at Al-Jazera by one Mark Glenn. Sullivan correctly comments: "Thus Nazi-style anti-Semitism entrenches itself in the Arab media." I would offer the slight correction that it should be "thus we see one more example of..."
Sullivan's money quote (it's a long piece from which one could take many, and no, you don't have to bother reading the whole thing, life is far too short):
"While the majority of Americans may at present be walking around in a state of semi-hypnotic denial concerning the war in the Middle East and the role of Israel in all of it, the rest of the world most assuredly is not. Elsewhere, in nations not as infected with the corrupting influence of Zionist power, the people have maintained with perfect clarity their understanding of the picture posed by the connecting dots of political events. The rest of the world has been able to note names like Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Sharon, and a whole host of others of similar stripe going back 50 years, and whose ethnic and religious loyalties are no mystery. The “elephant in the room” described recently by a Jewish reporter at the New York Times, the elephant which America seems unwilling or unable to recognize is clearly visible to the rest of the world community whom America seems to disregard. Therefore, when Bush & Co. start talking about “freedom, liberation, and the war on terror,” the rest of the world which has not swallowed the blue pill knows that the marionette dancing in Washington DC is directed by hands attached to the centers of power in Tel Aviv."
The second is a letter to Sullivan from a reader which serves as an excellent companion to this previous item from BlackFive pointing to the whackiness (and that's perhaps far too harmless-sounding a word) of some otherwise reasonable, Westernized Middle Easterners.
I attended a doctor's party the other night with my partner. A film-maker myself, I always find this other world interesting to say the least - another "bubble".
I settled into a chat with a young doctor, born in the US of Egyptian parents. He was charming and very 'LA' - well-coiffured, soft-spoken and well-dressed. We chatted a while about his world in the forensics department at LAPD which I found interesting as a film-maker. We started chatting a little about the Middle East. I assumed he knew I was Jewish. And I thought, wow, what a great place America is - I can chat with an Egyptian as a Jew without any of the sorry overtones of the current crisis in the mid-East; Jew and Arab are bonded by our common Western upbringing.
I expressed reasons why I supported Israel, we both agreed Arafat was a bandit, but he explained why the Palestinian cause had such support in Arab countries. It was a very civil, pleasant conversation despite our differences...
And then it started coming out...
That one you should read in full.
