The FBI maintains offices in at least 12 Arab capitals. So, where did the impression that the Arabs are seething with anti-Americanism come from? Isn't it possible that the Arabs may be sharing the anti-American craze produced in the West, including the United States? Aren't the Arabs, as is the case with other products, importing anti-Americanism? Go through Arab newspapers and you will see that the bulk of the material that could be classified as anti-Bush and/or anti-American is translated from American sources. Stroll in the streets where books and video and audio tapes are on sale at the curbsides and you will see that 90 percent of the items vilifying America come from American, French, and British authors. No Arab anti-American has produced anything like the conspiracy theories that American intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Scott Ritter, Seymour Hersh, and Edward Said, to name a few, have put on the markets everywhere, including the Arab world. At any given time one can find a horde of American activists visiting the region to urge the natives to hate America. Before the liberation of Iraq scores of Americans came to Baghdad to offer themselves as "human shields" for Saddam Hussein. No Arab was foolish enough to do that. This month a group of 30 American professors turned up in Tehran and Damascus to describe the US as "a rogue state on the rampage. A lady named Bianca Jagger, presented as ambassador for UNICEF and "a leading thinker", has been in the region telling astonished audiences that the US was the source of all evil in the world. (Incidentally, I thought the UNICEF was not supposed to be political.).  One American professor recently published an op-ed in the New York Times relating his trip to Iran where he was "disappointed" to see that students not only did not hate George W. Bush but, horror of horrors, also craved for an American-style democracy instead of an Islamist utopia. The anti-Bush demonstrations the Arabs watch on TV take place in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Seattle, not in any Arab city. A friend, who happens to be a minister in an Arab state, was saddened this summer when, spending holidays with his family in the US as he had always done since student days, he had to quarrel with an old American schoolmate. The point of the dispute was that the American insisted that the US was an "evil empire" while the Arab believed that it could be a force for reform in the Middle East.  A Kuwaiti friend withdrew his son from an American university to "protect him from (being) brainwashed into hating the United States." (... the US is the only country where the late Khomeini who could hardly write a paragraph without making some grammatical error, is treated as a philosopher with a whole university course devoted to his "philosophy"? Not even in Iran where Khomeinism is in power anyone would dare make such a ridiculous offer to students.) Many polls have been conducted to show that the Arabs are anti-American. A more interesting poll would aim at finding out how many Americans are so afflicted by self-loathing as to devote their energies to a systematic vilification of their nation. The best that Ms. Hughes could do is to help make available to the Arabs the other side of the American debate; to show that not all Americans share Chomsky's belief that the US planned to kill six million Afghans solely to build a pipeline from Central Asia. Her aim should be to help Arabs understand America in all its contradictions, not necessarily to adore it. There are many issues on which the Arabs disagree with the United States. But most Arabs don't see that as a sign of anti-Arabism on the part of the US. Ms. Hughes should not regard it as a sign of anti-Americanism on the part of Arabs. By Dr. Aaron Lerner