Most men who walked to safety through the desert that night and the following night were helped by Arabs. I’ve heard of only two cases where Arabs refused to help Americans. One put “Satch” Elkins into a ditch, and covered him with a long rope from a well, and another Arab walked twenty-five miles leading some enlisted men to safety. Many soldiers traded their overcoats for Arab burnooses to disguise themselves. There was much discussion of the Arabs among our men, and the average soldier seemed to have a feeling that an Arab couldn’t be trusted as far as you could throw him by the tail of his burnoose. But figures don’t lie, and the statistics of those awful nights of fleeing, crawling and hiding from death show that Arabs were ninety-nine per cent with us. Many hundreds of grateful Americans wouldn’t be alive today if the Arabs hadn’t helped them.
Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1943). Pages 196 to 197.
And now we’re going to justify killing innocent people who are Muslim in part because they have an alleged irrational hatred of Americans (today is 2001 September 20, look up Sept. 11 in a history book and tell me what happens in the aftermath). Logic and Pyle’s account suggest to me that either Arabs and Muslims don’t hate Americans or that the U.S. did things to make itself hated— or most likely, something of both.
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