Thomas Patrick Carroll, who is described as a former officer in the clandestine service of the CIA, makes the screamingly obvious -- and therefore never-made -- point on FrontPage.com about the perversity of blaming America for the rage in the Arab world. Addressing the idiotic remark by another former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, now a high-profile critic of American foreign policy, that global terror 'has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe, and everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world', Carroll observes of American support for Israel, the ostensible key grievance:

'Even though an ocean of ink has been spilled trying to show this is a major source of Arab hatred toward America, the results are unconvincing. Few of the real problems that plague the region have anything to do with Israel, and most Arabs know it. From the slaughterhouse of the Iraq/Iran war, to the invasion of Kuwait, to Syria’s continuing subjugation of Lebanon, to the failed experiments in Arab socialism, to the daily crunching of human beings under the heels of tyrants in practically every country of the Arab world — these are Muslim disasters, not Jewish ones. While Israel is certainly a source of irritation and a focus of anger, Bernard Lewis’s theory probably comes closet to the truth:

"[Israel] is, so to speak, the licensed grievance — the only one that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger." '

It cannot be stressed too often that victim culture, where victims get scapegoated and blamed for the wrongs committed against them by those who are committing those wrongs, lies at the root of our current confusions -- made infinitely worse by the fact that people like Scheuer and all the rest of the anti-war, anti-west, appeasenik malcontents and useful idiots have eagerly swallowed the whole lunatic anti-analysis and regurgitate it daily to pollute and distort the public debate.