Hating Arabs

Few political arguments are so detached from reality as the "Bush is Hitler" mantra.  The fanatics who put forth this argument have either wholly misunderstood America’s goals in the war, or are deliberately mischaracterizing them.

On any political question you’ll find disagreement [among Americans], and there is no single substantive characteristic we share as a people. ... Do Americans hate Arabs and Muslims?  Some do, some do not.  On that question, like every other question, there is no unanimity.  Some of us are Muslims.  Some are fascinated by Islam, some are repelled by it, and quite frankly, most don’t really care much about it one way or the other, or at least they didn’t prior to September of 2001.  If this nation is now actively trying to interfere in the affairs of the Arab and Muslim world, it is because Arabs tried to interfere with us, and made their problems become our problem as well.

But if we collectively hated the Arabs, we would not be acting as we are.  If we hated Arabs, we would have sent nuclear weapons into the Arab region, not our soldiers.  If we hated the Iraqis, we’d have exterminated them, rather than sacrificing our own young men to try to free them.

The Arabs who think America hates Arabs should consider what their own governments would do to Israel if they had one thousandth of the nuclear arsenal that the US has, and then compare that to what the US has actually done.  Do our actions really make sense as an expression of hatred, given what else we could have done instead?

We are not acting out of hatred, but we will not pander to the Arabs.  We are going to give the Arabs what they need, but that is not what many of them want.  And in the short run, some Arabs will interpret that as cruelty on our part.  But if we were motivated by hatred for the Arabs, we wouldn’t be bothering with that; instead, we would have killed them all within the first week after the Arab attack against us.

- Steve Den Beste