None dare call it racism...

when it involves Arabs. There's a nifty little firestorm in the US just now over the fact that a state-owned company from the UAE has bought a company that operates some major US ports. Democrats are seizing on this as an opportunity to portray the Bush administration as lax on safeguarding US shipping against terrorist attacks. Many conservatives agree, and the Bush administration is so off-balance that it's denying today that Bush himself knew anything about the government's approval of the sale.

So why is it that this is a big deal? Because it's Ay-rabs, that's why. No other reason. No one claims that the UAE is a rogue state, or even soft on terrorism. Quite the contrary.

Extremists and terrorists may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but only Ay-rabs are presumed to be terrorists. (And of course Iranians, who are treated as Ay-rabs because of, not in spite of, the racial illogic involved.)

Again I'll mention the uproar over the cartoons of the prophet. People who riot over images and the sacred may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but Ay-rabs are presumed to do so because of a clash of civilizations. This is classic racist illogic, the same kind of reasoning that says that anyone can be a drunk, but in the Irish it's a national trait; or anyone can be in organized crime, but Italians are different.