Those irrational, misled, conspiratorial Muslims

This game of Let's Mock Those Crazy, Conspiratorial Arabs and Muslims is as useful as it is common: recall how only the Paranoid "Arab Street" believed that the invasion of Iraq would lead to permanent American military bases in that country, only for this to be revealed, followed by this. There is a lot of propaganda, paranoia and myth in Pakistan, along with most places in the world. But the American media's fixation on pointing to it and deriding it has the principal effect (if not intent) of obscuring the role we play in enabling (and even justifying) those sentiments, along with at least our own equal share of such propaganda and our own media's central role in bolstering it.