It almost seems that every other week some Senator is attacking Islam. First, Arizona’s Jon Kyl - who is the second ranking Republican in the Senate - invited neo-fascist Dutch MP Greet Wilders to screen his hateful, bigoted anti-Islam propaganda and then Kyl sought to prevent Palestinians from immigrating into the United States solely because they are Palestinian.

And now Senator James Inhofe - Republican of Oklahoma - states that the “Middle Eastern mentality” - whatever that is - is worse than Nazism.

Speaking on a radio show, Inhofe stated his opposition to closing Guantanamo Bay and when the radio host stated it would be like letting lose Nazis, Inhofe said it “is a little worse than that, I think, because you’re dealing with the Middle East mentality.”

Most of the people at Gitmo are bad - some may be innocent as Colin Powell’s Chief of States states - but to speak about a “Middle East mentality” as somehow being more disposed to violence than other people is nothing short of racism. Inhofe’s thinking is probably rooted in Raphael Patai’s racist creed “The Arab Mind.” This is a book that went into reprinting after September 11th and, according to Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, is the Bible of the neo-conservatives.

I would recommend that you flip through it a little bit and see the racism against Arabs and Muslims that has now become acceptable in polite company. Patai’s argument, in short, is their is a peculiar “Arab mind” and that this mind is infected with every horrid attribute one can imagine.

Imagine the justified uproar if a government employee was got reading a neo-Nazi text titled “The Jewish Mind” or “The Black Mind” or is a Senator in discussing, say, Bernard Madoff spoke about the “Jewish mentality.” Arabs and Muslims though are not help to proper manners of respect in Western, particularly American, culture.

Listen to Inhofe:

Inhofe is grotesque, but it is hard to be offend by someone like him just because he has a history of making some of the most absurd statements. Besides being a serial denier of global warming, Inhofe is a fundamentalist Christian who is friends with crackpot Pat Robertson. Inhofe once actually took to the Senate floor to announce his pride in his family because in all their years, going back generations, they never had a divorce or a homosexual. His staff has also publicly admitted that he refuses to hire an openly gay person due to conflicts of interests. And when Senator John McCain, who was tortured by the Viet Cong, put forth a resolution explicitly banning torture that was supported by the Defense establishment, Inhofe was one of only nine senators to vote against the measure.

This guy is a buffoon, but unfortunately will people mock him when he says their is not global warming or that homosexuality is a choice; his views on the Middle East and endorsement of the notion of a specific “Middle East mentality” is something that is widely held in the United States even among liberal circles.