| So, I was watching an interview the other day with the President of Syria, Bashar alAssad. The interviewer was American, probably of the more liberal spectrum, but American nonetheless. I began the interview thinking, "This is one of the most dangerous men in the world, and here we are chatting with him like he is the most recent winner on American Idol." As I continued to watch, though, it struck me that this guy sounded pretty smart, and had some pretty decent ideas. The one that stood out the most was probably his thought about how the Middle East is not America, and American ideas simply won't work there. I pondered that for a while. "This is true," I thought to myself, "this guy really isn't all that bad. Maybe George Bush is the guy to blame?" He continued to talk about his ideas of what society should be, and then the interviewer threw out some quick, definitely beating around the bush questions about freedom of speech and this and that, yada yada.... Needless to after the interview my world was shaken. How could this be? How could this guy be.... right? I mean, what if our ideas of liberty and freedom simply aren't for the vast majority of the world?
So I thought, maybe we could ask the people themselves. Certainly they could tell us. Unfortunately, there is one problem. This problem is that we can't. They can't be heard. Why, because that freedom we stupid Americans think everyone has doesn't apply to those under oppression in the Middle East. Something we simply can't realize, not matter how many times history tries to teach us is that people like, Saddam, Hitler, and alAssad don't care about anyone but themselves, and the sad thing is that we are no different than them.
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