We Are The World?

Suicide bombers mingle with Mr. Tickle at Tehran book fair

TEHRAN (AFP) - Scooby Doo, where are you..? If you're at Tehran's book fair and looking for something for the kids, you'll find the stand right next to Islamic Jihad's and around the corner from those other surprising pillars of the publishing world, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran's massive annual literary fest, it seems, has pretty much something for everyone: Thomas the Tank Engine, interior decorating, Microsoft Windows programming, "How to Kill an Israeli" and Jean-Paul Sartre.

"We have a stand here every year," explained a young man at the Hamas booth, which featured T-shirts blazened with the portrait of their late spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, replica suicide bomber headbands and posters featuring mugshots of Palestinians who "blew themselves to bits.

But we're all the same, right? In fact, American culture is inferior to these peoples', say the libs.

But Hezbollah even had something for kids: "Resistance Boy: The Boy from Quds (Jerusalem)" is the name of the PC CD-Rom.

"It's a game for children. They have to shoot down Israeli aircraft and shoot at other things," explained the Hezbollah salesman.

For adults he recommended "Special Force", a 3D shoot-em-up in which nifty programmers have managed to turn aliens into Israelis, and where the object of the game is to die.

No, we are not all the same. The majority of people in the Mideast are murderous scum who are still living in the 7th century, and until I see the majority of them speaking out against this kind of stuff, I will continue to believe that. So far I've heard maybe a half dozen speak out against it since 9/11. And most of those didn't sound very sincere.

A half dozen, compared to the thousands that I saw dancing in the streets after 9/11.

Did anybody see a single person in America dancing in the street after that massive earthquake hit Iran a couple of years ago? Or after the tsunami wiped out a couple-of-hundred-thousand Muslims?

No, what you saw was our offer of aid to Iran (which they rejected), and hundreds of billions of dollars given to the tsunami victims.

We are not all the same. Don't ever try to equate me with these people. It would be hard to come up with a worse insult. I, and most Americans (and a few Canadians), are so vastly superior to these people as to make it seem that we're different species.

And before you lefties start becoming apoplectic, let me say that it really has nothing to do with race. If white people in some part of the world (say, France) were acting this way, I'd call them scum, too. It's all about attitude. You show me a majority of Mideastern people speaking out against terrorism against America and Israel and I'll take back every word.

Until then, I'll wait for Hell to become a Frigidaire dealership.