There should be a five minute Google test for any rhetorical questions or assertions in story. Just like every writer needs an editor, every editor and writer needs to use the resources around them to do the minimum amount of research before printing stupidity. The latest is a hit piece on Barack Obama in which the reporter asks whether Barack Obama’s first name is either Swahili or Arabic (Obama has, at different times, attributed it to both). Five minutes with a search engine would shown him that it’s both. Oh, and Hebrew too.

It’s amazing to me that Europeans don’t really get this considering how much their languages draw from German or Latin origins. There’s a whole world that existed prior to the Renaissance when Europe was not the core power. Africa and the Arab nations and India all traded heavily before Europe came along through colonization. There’s a lot of shared culture there, just as there is between the cultures of the Middle East.