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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (91180)	4/8/2003 11:51:20 AM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Many in America, like me, know how this respected Egyptian feels: Egyptian Intellectual Speaks Of the Arab World's Despair "We should never lose hope," he remarked the other day from his 18th-floor law office overlooking the Nile, a room crammed with books and brightened with paintings of sailboats on calm waters. "Frustration is not an option." But in truth, Mr. Aboulmagd admitted, he is just whistling in the dark. Never have America's Arab friends, he said, felt so estranged from the United States. "People in Egypt and many parts of the Arab world used to love America, and now they have a sense of being betrayed, misunderstood, taken lightly," he said. "And when it comes to the central problem of the Middle East — the Arab-Israeli conflict — we feel that even a minimum of American even-handedness is missing." Mr. Aboulmagd is one of Egypt's best-known intellectuals, a senior aide to former President Anwar el Sadat, consultant to the United Nations and ever-curious polymath whose interests range across the fields of Islamic jurisprudence, comparative religions, literature, history and commercial law. Like many educated Egyptians of his generation, he is a man whose views on democracy and political values were shaped by reading the United States Constitution, the Federalist papers and the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. For him the United States was a "dream," a paragon of liberal values* to be emulated by Arabs and Muslims seeking to have a voice in the modern world. Rest of Article: nytimes.com rascal@ *.com

To: Ilaine who wrote (91180)	4/8/2003 11:55:13 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

ehm...excuse me...you do not need a shrink to diagnose suicide. Take a look at suicide rates around the world and correlate it with the country's level of industrialization and material comfort. Your argument is an old, old one. It's the one about the happy natives frolicking in their natural habitat, unspoiled by modern man. I think the Greeks had a similar argument, maybe Plato. To begin with, it was not an argument. You said there is no such thing as a consumerism belief system and I said there is an implicit one. And what if this is an old argument? BTW, I don't think it goes as far back as you say. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first I know of who brought it up in full...and no I don't want to discuss Rousseau here. ST