I'm less interested in what a figure like Al Qassem actually said than in the staging of such a confrontation (it was sponsored by Sharjah's American University). This event, like the thunderous postwar editorials penned by some Arab liberal journalists, was actually about news narratives and the stories Arabs are telling themselves about their world. The more Pan-Arabists are forced to defend their versions against challenges from other Arabs, the more alternative views -- liberalism foremost among them -- are legitimized. [End]