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I taught Saudi princelings many years ago, when I was a sweet young thing. They have an awful way of looking at you (women)--sort of a nasty/hateful rather than an appreciative/wholesome leer. Anytime you can't figure out whether a middle-easterner is from the Islamic states or from India--just pay attention to how he looks at women. You'll figure it out in a flash. Shudder.

Anyway, there were a fair number of fair-haired girls who were quite charmed with these young men, who carried with them both the exoticism of the desert and the hopes of big oil money.

I think that Pat Roush, when she criticizes the Bush oil connections, may well be "projecting" her own disappointed desires for an alliance with rich oil.

They have an awful way of looking at you (women)--sort of a nasty/hateful rather than an appreciative/wholesome leer.

Yeah, it is very disconcerting.

Several years back, I was at a computer conference (now defunct) called Guide, for IBM mainframe stuff. Having breakfast one morning in a crowded coffee shop, the only open seat happened to be next to me. It was taken by a ME man, who turned out to be an IT guy for the Saudi Air Force. I tried to make conversation with him as I had recognized him from several sessions earlier in the week, and he acted like I had a communicable disease. He looked at me as though I were a pile of camel dung.

I have known several women who married Muslims, and their experiences have uniformly been disastrous. Beatings, financial disputes, child-rearing conflict, and general misery constituted the best of them. The rest were worse.

Combine this with my experience with an Iranian instructor in college who was loathe to even pass women, much less give me my A, I never, never, never have been attracted to any man who wasn't USA to the bone. I commend that attitude to every American woman.