In case you thought the Arab Street™ had settled down with a couple of brewskies and watched American Idol and chilled out a little, well … no such luck.

The Associated Press wants you to know that the Arab Street™ still hates us, so much that even the intellectuals are ready to strap on Semtex vests and commit holy mass murder: Palestinians Blame Plight on U.S., Israel. (Hat tip: dan rudy.)

AMMAN, Jordan - Mohammed Domeh was relaxing on his living room sofa, watching the TV news when he heard the fateful words: President Bush was flatly ruling out the return of Palestinians such as himself to what is now Israel.

“When I heard what Bush had to say — and I am saying this as a Palestinian intellectual — I wished I could wear an explosive belt around my waist and blow myself up in front of Bush,” said Domeh, 44.

Such anti-American rage, from an otherwise mild-spoken, middle-class Palestinian writer, is being echoed around the Arab world at a volume some say is unprecedented.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of Washington, told France’s Le Monde newspaper that U.S. support for Israel, on top of the war in Iraq, has driven Arabs to a “hatred never equaled” toward America.

The trigger was Bush’s meeting with Ariel Sharon last week, after which the president publicly backed the Israeli prime minister’s plans to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, endorsed the permanence of some big Jewish settlements in the West Bank and said a solution of the refugee question “will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”

Unlike Domeh, teacher Raja Dirbash said she wasn’t surprised. It merely confirmed what Israel and the United States had agreed long ago.

“What do you expect from a murderer?” she said.

AP combines this admiring look at Arab rage with a blatantly misleading two-sentence summary of Middle Eastern history:

Fifty-six years after they fled the land that would become Israel, millions of Palestinians still claim a right to return. Some, like Domeh, have built new lives and citizenships, while many others live in squalid refugee camps. Dirbash, 46, insists on living in the Baqaa refugee camp outside Amman until she returns to her ancestral home.

Domeh yearns for the 100 acres he says his family abandoned when they fled their village near Haifa in 1948. He thinks it must be worth $1 million today.

“Millions of Palestinians” fled Israel 56 years ago? Any source for this outrageous claim, AP?