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"Resentment of US cultural imperialism is merely a supersized version of the charges levelled at ’tween-wars European Jewry: the anti-globalisation crowd, droning on about interlopers interested only in profits and swamping local cultures, are singing a very old song. Indeed, the savvier Aryans can claim to have seen it coming. As Werner Sombat wrote in The Jews and Economic Life (1911): ‘One can rightly say that the United States owes what it is entirely to the Jews: that is, its American nature. What we call Americanism to a large degree is nothing other than the influence of the Jewish spirit.’ . . . American sympathy for Israel and European support for the Arabs are essentially cultural statements, unrelated to the finer points of the ‘Palestinian question’. America supports Israel not because it’s Jewish but because it’s democratic."
"Republicans look at Israel and see not Jews but a liberal democracy. Funnily enough, that’s also what the Arabs see. They don’t hate America because it backs Israel; they hate Israel because it looks like America — it’s a functioning state. If you get out a map of the world and look at the vastness of the Arab lands from North Africa to the Gulf with a tiny Israeli sliver in the middle (if you accept the 1967 borders, it’s only 11 miles wide at one point), it’s simply not possible for any rational human being to blame the tiny sliver for all the woes of the surrounding vastness. At least in the old days Muslim victim culture sought out more plausible oppressors."
"In the objective sense, the Arab states are failures. If Israel was ‘imposed’ on the region in the Forties, the other nations date only from the Twenties. The only difference is the Jews have made a go of it."
"So each half of the West looks in the Middle East for what it values most in itself: for the Americans, liberty; for Europe, paternalism, benign or otherwise. The result is a mirror image: just as Israel is the odd man out in the Middle East, so increasingly America is in the West, wedded as it is to such bizarre concepts as capital punishment, gun rights, free speech, etc."
"Having grown up in Arab countries that place no value on work and provide little incentive to economic activity, your would-be suicide bomber fits easily into the welfare culture of the European Union or Canada."
"In the Middle East, two cultures jostle side by side: one channels its citizens’ energy into economic fulfilment, the other into pathetic victim fantasies. The sides the United States and the European Union have chosen to align themselves with say as much about themselves and their own psychological health as they do about Palestine." ... [more]
2:13:36 PM Google It! 
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