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Sad, but true...

"The Arabs, he says, believe that the Americans are their enemies. "The US was once a promise to them. I sit with young people and try to differentiate between American policies and Americans. But the enemies of the Americans are not only the Taliban, Hamas, Hizbollah, but a wide sea of ordinary people who hate them because the Americans created the polarisations in their lives. They are between impotence and despair. This is a catastrophe."

So writes Robert Fisk in a piece [in The Independent] on his meeting with a person Fisk describes as "the Middle East's most famous scribe" Mohamed Hasseinein Heikel.

This sobering piece is well worth reading - for it gives a background to the travails now confronting the Middle East and the wider world. Sad thing is that the very people who ought to read what people like Heikel are saying won't. Even sadder is that even if they did read the Fisk piece they wouldn't have the depth or intellect to understand it and what the "message" in there is.

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