This is a blog that will offend many people. If you believe, as most Americans do, that all humans are basically alike, you will be offended.
International relations for many centuries have been predicated on the observation that each nation has its own national character. Reading Herodotus one finds his descriptions of hundreds of peoples in the world reported to him in terms of national character. All those peoples who have survived are still described in much the same ways (excluding some of the physical fantasies that Herodotus reports).
Since the beginning of the 20th Century, through the work of Franz Boaz and many other anthropologists and linguists, we have come to know the idea of culture as the contemporary version of national character. Culture describes human character, behavior and worldviews that are deep, pervasive and largely unchanging.
For three decades I have spent considerable time in Japan and I can say unequivocally that I have never been able to get a Japanese to make a dishonest statement. A Japanese might be evasive or not answer, but never would a Japanese make a dishonest statement. The borders of the term Japanese are not known to me. Is a third generation descendent of Japanese grandparents in San Paolo still unable to make a dishonest statement? I don’t know.
This is preparation and prologue for a statement about the national character of Arabs. Arabs have no idea what it means to lie. Ask an Arab a question and the answer, if it can be tested for validity, will not be related to reality, except by chance. The answer will be designed to save face or create the least friction between the person asking and the Arab answering.
If the Arab can be shown to have made factually conflicting statements, more false statements will be used to cover the issue. If this lying to cover up inconsistency doesn’t work, a conspiracy of Americans and Jews will be introduced as an explanation. (50 years ago the conspiracy was blamed on the British.)
I personally have employed dozens of Arabs; they were good workers and some remain my friends. But the reader can’t know my experience. There are two public examples. One, the leading Arab intellectual in America: Edward Said. Said, a tenured professor at Columbia University, lied without hesitation in his autobiography about nearly every factual detail of his life.
The other, the single best known Arab in the world, lied about everything, every day. Two of his speeches are online without an honest statement in either of them (Arafat at Davos 2001, Ramalah, 2002), see for yourself. Fortunately the man died yesterday. But the fact that he always lied and his people never challenged his lies is the best evidence of my contumely about Arabs. Arabs have no idea what a lie is.
What are the borders of the term Arab? The term clearly excludes Turks, Persians and Ethiopians. Does it include Kurds, third generation Arab Americans? I don’t know.