Twenty Years Old in the Middle East

This documentary by Lebanese-borm filmmaker Amal Moghaizel is on TV right now. It interviews a number of young Arabs and Persians in their early 20s about what they want and expect out of life. They feel powerless although they go on with their lives as best they can.
They are so conflicted about America. They hate it and yet they love it. They love being Arabs and yet they wish they were anything but Arabs. They express disappointment in and distrust of America -- as their speech is peppered with American phrases such as "family and kids", "country of peace". One group of friends sat around a table with the Sudanese girl enumerating all the substitutes for American items she found. They break into laughter at how Zam-Zam Cola tastes like cough syrup and profess they don't miss Coke and got used to the Zam-Zam. The other girl's father works at Pepsi and she opines that they don't think of McDonalds and Pepsi as being American things anymore because they employ Arabs and provide benefits in their lives. A waiter brings burgers. The boy finally speaks up to say -- perhaps the burger buns made him think of it -- that they can't afford to boycott American wheat, but they do have a valuable commodity in oil at least.
Fascinating how American culture is so woven into the fabric of the lives of these Arab kids. The Syrian medical student insists that Americans are rich and ill-educated (not saying she's wrong) and that all the achievements of America can be attributed to immigrants (well yeah! we're all immigrants and it has enriched our nation in so may tangible and intangible ways. Maybe that's why we don't try too hard to keep people out. It has been a win-win situation for so long, we don't want that to end).
The Lebanese boy whose whole family speaks French at home goes to Sabra-Chatila to teach kids to draw. He says it's another window for the kids, a way to create opportunity. What a good young man, I think. I want to go help right now. I want to send a massive peace corps of helpful American twenty-somethings.
These are good kids in a difficult situation. They are not angels. They drink some of the kool-aid -- a few experiences and a few dark nights of the soul could send most of them down the path taken by Hamas and Hizbollah, but they are not nearly there yet. They want to be proud of who they are. They want better leadership. They do some of their own thinking. They are just people.

When 20 Years Old in the Middle East was over, I switched to CSPAN and caught Dr. Rice talking about the government's plan for outreach to the Muslim world to try to improve the economic situation, the situation of women, and so forth.
Rice said there is no greater outreach than to say that there is a future in freedom for Arabs built on democratic values and economic opportunity.
Governments have a way of accomplishing approximately a quarter of what they announce they are going to do, usually with ambiguous results. So this "outreach" isn't going to amount to much. The people, united, could do a whole lot more.
It saddens me that these fanatical jihadi freaks with their attacks and these corrupt Arab politicians with their tribal mentality create an atmosphere that is stifling ordinary Arabs. Arabs should be proud of their strength that they can survive all that.
It's too bad they don't see that their allegiances don't have to be along ethnic or religious lines, that America the country of immigrants is the model for helping them free themselves of that. Here, no one expects you to tolerate ill treatment or poor leadership from someone just because they share an ethnic identity with you. Here, American values of tolerance would actually allow more religious freedom for Muslims than the fundamentalists could ever bear. We would stand up for one's right to practice Islam however one sees fit, the fanatics exert pressure to make everyone's Islam the same extremist type.
Anyway. It was a decent film.