Zogby’s an idiot: Says we need more understanding of Arabs. No, they need to police they own.

John Zogby and his feel-good crap:

America has enormous interests in that region. In the past 30 years, we've spent more money, sold more weapons, sent more troops, fought more wars, lost more lives, had more economic and political interests at stake, and expended more diplomatic capital in the broader Middle East than anywhere else on the globe. And yet recent polling shows that two-thirds of all Americans can't point to Iraq on a map, just as many don't know the year that Israel declared its independence, the same number don't realise that Iran and Pakistan aren't Arab countries, while about one- half share prejudicial and stereotypical views of Arabs as angry, backward, violent fanatics.

There are, of course, consequences to this lack of knowledge, all of which came into sharp focus in the lead up to the Iraq war. It was against the backdrop of ignorance that our political leadership and their echo chamber in the media were able to sell the public on the war's ease, the belief that we would be welcomed as liberators, and the notion that once the dictator was overthrown, democracy would flourish (remember neo-con Bill Kristol dismissing Iraq's Sunni/Shia tensions as "pop culture" for which he said "there's almost no evidence of that at all"). Because we knew so little of Iraq's history and culture, our young soldiers marched into Baghdad seeing themselves as "liberators". They had no idea that in the eyes of many Iraqis they were merely the new Mongols who had conquered and now occupied their land.

How did we get into the situation in which we knew so little about a world where we had so much at stake? As I note in my new book, Arab Voices: What they are saying to us and why it matters, it all begins with education — or the lack of it.

You are wrong, John, completely and utterly.  Arabs need to police their own.  They need to control the rancid attitudes and bomb makers.  They need to stop killing Jews.  Then maybe we'll give a rip to understand what's left standing.

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