Thomas Friedman in today’s NY Times, writing about the Arab world’s sympathy for murderers like Osama Bin Laden: Run, Osama, Run.

On the way back from Kabul, I passed through Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, London and Belgium, where I had a variety of talks with Arab and Muslim journalists and business people and Muslim community leaders in Europe. All of them were educated, intelligent and thoughtful — and virtually none of them believed that Osama bin Laden was guilty.

Let’s see, there was the serious Arab journalist in Bahrain who said that Arabs could never have pulled off something as complex as Sept. 11; there was the Euro-Muslim woman in Brussels who looked at me as if I was a fool when I said that the bin Laden tape in which he boasted of the World Trade Center attack was surely authentic and had not been doctored by the Pentagon; there was the American-educated Arab student who insisted that somehow the C.I.A. or Mossad must have known about Sept. 11 in advance, so why didn’t they stop it? There was the Saudi businessman who declared that there was a plot in the U.S. media to smear Saudi Arabia, for absolutely no reason. And there was the Pakistani who confided that his kids’ entire elementary school class believed the canard that 4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were warned not to go to the office on Sept. 11.

I think Friedman is missing something here, though, when he says “none of them believed that Osama bin Laden was guilty.” It’s more complex than that; these people don’t really believe that stuff. They’re aware of the truth. They know Osama’s guilty. But stories like this scare and piss off Westerners like Friedman—and that’s what they’re after. A quick fix of anti-Americanism is much more pleasant than painful self-examination, and those Americans squirm so beautifully.

They even write all about it in the New York Times.