You Mean, They Used To Like Us?

I guess we're supposed to be bothered, or surprised or something by Hosni Mubarek's declaration that, sinc the Iraqi occupation, Arabs now hate the United States.

"In the beginning, some people thought the Americans were helping them," Mubarak told the French newspaper Le Monde. "There was no hatred toward Americans." But "after what has happened in Iraq, there is an unprecedented hatred."

Gee. Weren't those Arabs dancing in the streets after 9/11? Weren't the hijackers Arabs?

Jeff Jacoby points out that Arabs have hated us (and just about everyone else) before we invaded Iraq.

For example, it was Al-Ahram, a newspaper controlled by the Egyptian government, that claimed in October that US pilots flying over Afghanistan were dropping "genetically treated" food into areas booby-trapped with land mines -- hoping not only to make Afghans sick but to cripple or kill those who attempted to gather the food. It was Al-Akhbar, another regime-sponsored daily, that declared in August: "The Statue of Liberty . . . must be destroyed because of the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism. . . . The age of the American collapse has begun."