He adds, in a footnote:

There is an irony in the use of abid (lit. ‘slave’, but effectively ‘nigger’) in reference to blacks in North Africa: A great many slaves who came into the Middle East, and North Africa in particular, were white — Europeans, peoples from the Caucus and so on. Most black slaves, brought up through the Sahara, died on the way to the big trading centers. White slaves were far more numerous in Algeria and Tunisia than were blacks. Therefore it is terrifically ironic when a red-haired Tunisian or blond Algerian bitterly refers to an illegal Malian immigrant as abid, while he passes through on his way to Italy or France. And this is not only the case in North Africa, but many other Arab countries as well.

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Z, you have a funny way of looking at cause and effect when you say:

“Black Americans should know that African slavery really kicked into gear when Arab and African Muslims sold African Christians, Jews and Animists to the Europeans.”

You’re right, Arabs and Turks had a long history of taking slaves. But, Europeans and Americans didn’t build the slave trade because the Arabs did such a good job of marketing them, but because colonial agriculture needed the labour.

My understanding of the slave trade out of West Africa, for the Caribbean (sp?) and America was that the suppliers were other Africans, as much if not more than Arabs. You can’t pick one race or religion out of all the different groups that played a role in the slave trade, and say no-one else was to blame: white and black, arab and african, chistian, muslim and animist, were all guilty.

however, the extremists are only a % of the muslim world, and our simplistic foreign policies have done a good job of alienating much of the remainder. we don’t have enough friends and we have ceeded the “moral high ground” on many issues (lets get Gitmo in there too).

With respect to Israel and the idea that Zionism and American support for it is driving terror- I promise, Muslim extremists have hated Westerners long before 1948.

While I agree that we need to pull our troops out of the vast majority of those bases, you’re a bit naive if you think that’s why we are hated. The people who hate us hold a worldview which makes no sense to the modern secular mind. They really actually do want to finish the religious wars that started with the Islamic conquests of half of the Roman Empire and Persian Empire, and that ended when the Ottoman Empire was finally overthrown by its subject peoples.

We could stop supporting Israel tomorrow, and they would still hate us because their goals are broader and more long term than that. Bin Laden has stated in the past that one of Al Qaeda’s goal is to create a rallying cry in the Islamic world to unite once more as a single entity against the rest of the world.

“It is my hope that President-Elect Obama will continue to support our military and the counter-terrorism infrastructure that has kept us safe for the past seven years.”

I whole-heartedly disagree with this statement. It is our 300 military bases in 130 countries along with or imperialism that causes such alignment of philosophical hate, not prevents it.

I’m sure they’ll apologize and say there was an error in translation.