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Another thing that occurs to me - the standard Islamist babble is usually hyper-inflated: to hear them tell it, they "conquered" New York on 9/11. Yeah, right, they destroyed about 5 large buildings and killed about 3000 people, but they forgot to tell that to the other 25,000,000 who live in the NY metro area.

If that amount of damage means they "conquered" New York in any reasonable sense of the word, Hitler would have been walking down the streets of London in the 1940's, and we all know what happened to him!!

You are right - it is hyperinflated. History lesson...

I remember my first trip to Egypt. I flew in on October 5, 1982, one day before the first anniversary of the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Now I vaguely remembered that October 6 was the anniversary of the Sadat assassination but I really wasn't paying too much attention. The next day everyone was off work. It seemed kind of strange, but hey - it wasn't my culture! Then I realized that the country was in a festive mood. There were parades, and all sorts of commemorative military programs on TV. Talk about feeling a HUGE disconnect.

So I asked what the heck everyone was celebrating. I was told that they were celebrating the October the 6th war with Israel. So I sat there quietly for a few minutes, did a mental review of the history of the Arab/Israeli conflict, and this didn't make sense. So I asked the question that I was teased about until the day I left Cairo in 1989: Why in the world are you guys celebrating a war you lost?

They thought I was insane! What? Egyptians lost the 1975 war with Israel? According to the Egyptian perspective, the war was a huge victory. I was quickly acquainted with the facts according to the Egyptian government: The Egyptians attacked the Israelis, crossed the heavily fortified and impossible to penetrate Bar Lev line at the Suez Canal, and fought bravely until the Americans and Kissinger had to intervene to save the Israelis from defeat. (Sadat was assasinated by Islamic fundamentalists at a parade celebrating the 1975 war, largely because of his crackdowns on Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt, his pro-western views, and because of his willingness to made peace with Israel.)

Course I'm sitting there thinking "what alternate reality did THIS happen in!". But from their perspective, the Egyptians had won - after all, they were at peace with Israel, the US was pouring huge amounts of foreign aid in to stimulate the Egyptian economy and build a private sector, and they had just gotten back the Sinai peninsula.