literally everything imputed to the Persian or Muslim…can be applied to “the American”… Who but “the American” denies history and reality in saying unilaterally that these mean nothing to “the Persian”? Now play the following parlor game: find a major Judeo-Christian cultural and social equivalent for the traits that Laingen ascribes to “the Persian”. Overriding egoism? Rousseau. Malevolence of reality? Kafka. Omnipotence of God? Old and New Testaments. Lack of causal sense? Beckett. Bazaar mentality? The New York Stock Exchange. Confusion between words and reality? Austin and Searle. But few people would construct a portrait of the essential West using only Christopher Lasch on narcissism, the words of a fundamentalism preacher, Plato's Cratylus, an advertising jingle or two and (as a case of the West's inability to believe in a stable or beneficial reality) Ovid's Metamorphoses laced with choice verses from Leviticus.

In contrast to a trust in the general applicability of models such as honour and shame, both social and cultural anthropology has in light of recent developments abandoned a purely “exotic” view of culture and social life. The ethnocentric “West and the Rest” mentality, most notably challenged by Edward Said's Orientalism no longer holds persuasion in a discipline that gives greater attention to individual diversity within the field.

At the most simple level, this [divine] rage [generated from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ] will be directed at whoever our enemy of the moment might be.