Does it ever occur to you that the same people we ridicule as "ragheads"

[KlatooBNikto]

and "camel jockeys" were given credit as the masterminds of 9/11?
How did that transformation from primitive tribesmen to plane hijackers occur?Curious minds want to know.

On Edit: When I said "we" I meant the terms that have been used both here and in Iraq, Saudi Arabia by the extremists in our midst in characterizing these people.

My intent was to highlight the dichotomy between the contempt toward their intelligence these terms imply and our easy falling for the Bush-Cheney- Rumsfeld storyline that they are masterminds who could fly massive airliners with no training whatsoever.

[Bluebear]

1. I do marvel at the people who use those terms....

are suddenly in great rapture that Bush brought "freedom" to them, as though they care for them all of a sudden.

[BigMcLargehuge]

2. I am sure you can provide a link where someone at DU

referred to them as Ragheads and Camel Jockeys... right?

[The Magistrate]

3. Who Is This 'We' You Speak Of, Sir?

[Bluebear]

8. I think they meant the royal "we", Americans in general

[pie]

4. It is a stretch, I agree

[The Magistrate]

7. Does That Mean, Sir

That you feel Middle Easterners lack what one old sportscaster once called "the necessaries" for such an action?

[NoodleBoy]

5. I've never called anyone a "raghead" or a "camel jockey"

and I never intend to. One of my best friends in junior high was a Sikh, and I got pretty pissed off when one of my other friends referred to him that way.


By the way, it works because all modes of fascism have an element of irrationality to them. So to the extremists who actually denigrate people by insinuating that they're primitive, it doesn't matter that those people can fly planes and kill people just as easily as we can.

[warrior1]

6. surely

you mean "They", not us.

[unhappycamper]

9. Around 850 A.D., a Baghdad mathematician invented

algebra. I'm trying to recall some Western Civilization highlites around that time but am coming up blank. Can someone help me with a Western accomplishment or two from that time?

Primitive, indeed.

[Journeyman]

10. "This reminds me of Richard Coeur de Lion . . .

demonstrating the edge of his sword to Saladin
by savagely hacking a bar of iron in half.
Then the Moslem displayed his scimitar
by tossing a cushion in the air and quartering it
without a sound. This was to be expected, of course,
because Arab astronomers had been calculating
equinoctial precession and the angle of the eliptic
while Europeans were interpreting a fanciful sky
decorated with goats, bulls, crabs and fishes."

From Points for a Compass Rose
by Evan S. Connell



(For the discerning reader, there's a multitude
of messages within this single quote.)