[cake_crumb]

"Here in Silicon Valley we have thousands of Arab and Muslim programmers, engineers, scientists, and businesspeople making a real contribution to technology"

I support your position that Arabs are not dumb or, in general, culturally backward. However, the Arab and Muslim programmers, engineers, scientists and businesspeople you refer to are in the United States, a free country, and not living in Mideastern Islamic states.

Islamic states are not free, and the flower of creativity and individualism no longer blooms in those countries. If, at some point, an Islamic state decides to turn into one with a representational government, with the same basic freedoms we enjoy in the US, then those countries will progress. Heck, there aren't even public opinion polls about the leaders of these states.

There have been no great achievements in any of those countries in centuries. The reason os not ethnicity or religion. The reason is lack of freedom. It's hard to progress when your leaders keep you ground into the dirt under their bootheel, while hoarding oil money.

[Carry_Okie]

No argument there. I am merely pointing out that the way the article put it, ALL Arabs (including those in Europe) were portrayed as intrinsically backward, especially when compared to cosmopolitan Jewry. It was a racist generalization that discounts the idea that things could be any different were Arab political institutions reconstructed by their citizens.

Such positions lend tacit approval to treating Arabs as chattel. They allow for a policies that don't appear to me to be constructive but are instead a sophisticated means of ethnic cleansing by bureaucratic fiat. Such means are particularly familiar to those in the American West where environmental laws are being used to dispossess landowners of their property.

You can't help people (or settle their ancient grievances) if you don't respect their worth and potential. That is just a fact of nature.