I'm Really Sorry, but...

Jennifer Levitz's recent piece in the Providence Journal about local reactions to Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg's murder, particularly with respect to interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims, starts out well enough. However, it quickly moves through smirk-worthy to too-thickly laid:

At the mosque in North Smithfield, the largest of some six mosques in Rhode Island, Nasreen Ahmed desribes how she saw an American friend at the supermarket just after the pictures of U.S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners were made public.

Ahmed says her friend cried, right there in the market. "She said, 'I'm so sorry,' " Ahmed says. Shd told her friend, "It's not your fault. I'm very sorry, too. I'm sorry things are getting so bad."

Even so, the piece, as something sure to appeal to local tastes, wouldn't have sparked comment from me were it not for the following:

Fadel Abu-Hilal, a bakery worker, describes those conversations on a break. He has a goatee, dimples, and a cell phone hooked to his belt. He is 25, and from Jordan. He is in Rhode Island to attend Johnson & Wales. He recalls how one of his professors apologized to him a few days after the prison abuse photos came out. Then, a regular customer came into the bakery and said he was sorry.

"He felt bad. He said it felt humiliating," Abu-Hilal says. He told his customer, "Listen, Jimmy, I know how you're feeling."

Abu-Hilal says he is empathetic to how American citizens might feel -- misjudged -- because he felt misjudged after Sept. 11.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks, for instance, he was doing an internship at the front desk of a hotel in Boston. He says that a customer asked him if he was Arab -- and when he said yes, laughed and told him not to put a bomb in her room.

Now, it is American officials who are telling the world not to judge the United States and democracy from the pictures out of Abu Ghraib.

"I'm not going to do what Americans did after 9-11, no offense," says Abu-Hilal. "I'm not going to blame this country."

To begin with, a college professor's apology to a Muslim student for abuse of prisoners from a different Arab nation than the student and incarcerated as part of a war that the professor likely doesn't support strikes me as masturbatory ego-stroking. One can picture the prof. literally patting himself on the back after class.

But then the dramatic parallel with how Abu-Hilal was treated after 9/11 — treatment for which he offers a single mild, if annoying, example — raises a question that I don't think he intends. Did he go around apologizing to Americans for 9/11? It may be that he's "not going to do what Americans did" after a global organization of well-supported Muslims murdered 3,000 of their countrymen, but did he do, then, what those Americans are doing now that a handful of soldiers abused some prisoners? What he goes on to say offers a clue:

Abu-Hilal condemns the beheading of Nick Berg, who was killed in what his captors said was revenge for the prison abuse. Yet, he was not surprised that terrorists lashed out.

"I'm not telling you it was the right way, but what do you expect? I'm not saying it was right."

After that, well, talk about having to restore America's credibility rings a bit hollow.