The Arab world is suffering from a deep-seated schizophrenia as it slowly sorts out its ambiguous feelings toward the hated West. Do you despise a country that gives you oil-drilling equipment, Ford SUVs, and contact lenses, along with Spider-Man and McDonald's, as being crass, godless, and decadent? And if so, do you express such loathing between Big Macs, as you park your air-conditioned Wagoneer, board a 767, or put in eye drops for your glaucoma? Are America's unveiled, auto-driving, and sometimes belly-baring women sluts and worse? ? or do they accomplish far more than exciting the baser passions, such as doubling the work force and bringing critical brain power to the very pinnacles of society? Should you even shake hands with a Western woman, pay her to join your harem, lecture her about chastity ? or hire her to economize your bureaucracy, control your aircraft traffic, design your power grid, sort our your legal codes?
And what exactly is this mysterious Western paradigm ? the right to speak freely when visiting America, but not when you return to Egypt? If you are a envoy from the Sudan, Palestine, or Saudi Arabia, do you condemn America on Crossfire and Fox News, but then curb such criticism when it concerns Arafat and the royal princes at home? Quite simply, very few in the Arab world realize that the reason we produce CAT scanners and F-16s and Apaches, and they do not ? or the reason they come here to be schooled and we, as a rule, do not go there ? is that our universities are free, our governments elected and tolerant, our people welcome to chose any religion or none, and our schools secular and meritocratic rather than fundamentalist and tribal.
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