STANDARD RULES: This week's issue of The Weekly Standard has two articles which deserve to be discussed and remembered.

FIRST, THREE CHEERS FOR THE BOURGEOISIE: David Brooks has a monumental piece on why the Arabs and Europeans hate the U.S. and Israel. His thesis, in short, is that the U.S. and Israel are emblematic of bourgeois virtues and material success, and that the Arabs and Europeans are heirs to the tradition of "bourgeoisophobia," which emerged as soon as the bourgeois did. Taking any selection from Brooks' piece runs the risk of oversimplification, but here is a description of the phenomenon:
Bourgeoisephobia is really a hatred of success. It is a hatred held by people who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically, politically, and socially outranked. They conclude that the world is diseased, that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities. They become cynical if they are soft inside, violent if they are hard. In the bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just slightly vulgar, not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky. They are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly killed.
Brooks argues that:
[T]oday, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples--the Americans and the Jews--have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.
And so just as the French intellectuals of the 1830s rose up to despise the traders and bankers, certain people today rise up to shock, humiliate, and dream of destroying America and Israel. Today's bourgeoisophobes burn with the same sense of unjust inferiority. They experience the same humiliation because there is nothing they can do to thwart the growing might of their enemies. They rage and rage. Only today's bourgeoisophobes are not just artists and intellectuals. They are as likely to be terrorists and suicide bombers. They teach in madrassas, where they are careful not to instruct their students in the sort of practical knowledge that dominates bourgeois schools. They are Muslim clerics who incite hatred and violence. They are erudite Europeans who burn with humiliation because they know, deep down, that both America and Israel possess a vitality and heroism that their nations once had but no longer do.
...The bourgeoisophobes have no politburo. There is no bourgeoisophobe central command. They have no plausible strategy for victory. They have only their nihilistic rage, their envy mixed with snobbery, their snide remarks, their newspaper distortions, their conspiracy theories, their suicide bombs and terror attacks--and above all, a burning sense that the rising, vibrant, and powerful peoples of America and Israel must be humiliated and brought low.
There is much, much more, and it all should be read.
I have one quibble, though. As anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you, the Israeli economy and attitudes towards social organization are much closer to Western Europe than to the U.S. Israel has come very far from a free-market standpoint since the early 1980s, but it could still use a version of Margaret Thatcher in many ways. So I don't think that anti-bourgeios sentiment is all that helpful in explaining European antipathy towards Israel. (Straightforward anti-semitism probably has more to do with it.)
Other sources for similar arguments are this article in the NY Review of Books by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, and this hilarious Mark Steyn piece.

SECOND, THEY CAN COUNTERFEIT THE GREAT TRAGIDIANS: Also, Norman Doidge has an extraordinary article on how evildoers like Yasser Arafat use the consciences of good people for their own ends. Drawing on a fascinating analogy from Shakespeare's Richard III, he argues:
[W]hile conscience allows us to understand ordinary crimes, it actually blinds us before the most extraordinary ones.
...Conscience, when it is functioning well--automatically and without the intervention of reason, so that we do the right thing without thinking--is not simply rational. It is a force, a blunt instrument before which the conscientious person is guilty until proven innocent. As the preventive agency in the mind, conscience blocks first, thinks later. Men like Arafat and Richard know this. That is why both men constantly charge others with crimes--to paralyze them. Both know it doesn't matter whether the charges are false. Richard brazenly accuses Anne of inspiring the murder of her husband, as Arafat accuses the West of causing terrorism.
It is this force inside the psyche of his enemies that the person without a conscience can so effectively enlist as a fifth column. Having himself no such inner force always second-guessing him, he can see it clearly in others--far more clearly than do those who are in its thrall and take each of its charges seriously. Arafat gets endless second chances because the conscience of the West is doing what a conscience does: second-guessing the West's own actions. That is why Arafat is always playing upon the conscience of the West, especially by his endless recourse to "international law" and invocation of "human rights," an utterly brazen ploy coming from a terrorist.

What Arafat, and the Arab countries, do not understand is the extent to which they are playing with fire. When the U.S. "street" understands how their best instincts have been used against them, the reaction will be something which Arabs will warn their children about for many, many generations. Ask Germany and Japan.