Thursday, October 30, 2008

Just count the number of times Ajami uses the word "we" in this article. Some Arabs I know get so mad at Fouad Ajami. I don't. I remind them that opportunism punishes the opportunists: it kills their talents and skills, and they don't even notice. And then he says: "For all the talk about the rise of China and India, these societies, long mired in poverty and squalor and handicapped by dominant traditions of inequality and caste, are in no position to inherit the American place in the order of nations." This guy writes his typically sweeping generalizations without thinking or learning about what he writes. The US has had worse income inequality than China. In fact, China's income inequality was low until the country incorporated free enterprise. Will the US ever have a candidate who will proudly say: I am a socialist and a Marxist, and I am running for president. He then says: "The Chinese know Asia's bloody history. American hegemony has been benign." Oh, yes. American incineration of Japanese cities was quite benign, as was American colonization of the Philippines. But notice that this entire camapaign has been characterized with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim bigotry and somebody like him would not dare say a word about that: he is busy reminding the reader (seven times in one article) that he (or "we") is an American just like you. You see people like that have no dignity and pride: I imagine him at Zionist dinner party sitting and smiling while people around him are making fun of Arabs and Muslims, just as Henry Kissinger used to sit and smile when Nixon used to engage in his anti-Semitic diatribes in the Oval Office.