Algerian author Anwar Malek lays into his fellow Arabs in this remarkable clip from, of all places, Al Jazeera.

The Arabs are afflicted with fantasies and false bravado … We have a discourse of conspiracy and we blame everything on others … All we have are defeats which we package as victories …

Arab culture is afflicted with many pathologies, but political correctness doesn’t seem to be one of them. Any American TV producer who let someone talk like that on-air would be out of a job, black-listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and hit with a big fat lawsuit from CAIR, all before you could say “hurtful.”

Mr. Malek is wrong, however, to say that “The Arabs invented or discovered the zero.”

It is to the Indians — probably to the mathematician Brahmagupta, 598-670 CE — that the immortal honor of having discovered the number zero belongs …

– Unknown Quantity, p.47. (And don’t grumble to me about that “CE”; I’m an “A.D.” man myself, but while authors propose, publishers dispose. Don’t get me started on “invented” versus “discovered,” either. In fact, just don’t get me started — I’ve got a convalescing dog here.)