There are few people more worthy of lampoon and ridicule than Libyan dictator/unhinged douchebag Muammar Qaddafi. But while America dithers amid a civil war being fought to topple him (a civil war in which the rebels don’t have weapons, which represents an asinine lack of sand from us and our NATO allies), a YouTube dance video making fun of Qaddafi turns out to be as instructive an example as there is on the relationship between the West and the Muslim world.

First, the video, which is an auto-tune sendup of Qaddafi’s goofy speech in front of that bombed-out building last week…

“Zenga-zenga” is generally meaningless, in case you’re curious. Qaddafi kept repeating “zanqa,” which is the Arabic word for “alleyway.” He was saying something about hunting protestors down street by street, alleyway by alleyway.

Anyway, the video was made by a guy named Noy Alooshe. He played around on his computer with the speech, threw some music behind it and got video of a blonde dancing girl to complement the scene, and voila.

But it so happens Mr. Alooshe is an Israeli.

So it goes live, he pushes it out on Facebook and Twitter, and the Arabs get a huge kick out of it. It went viral all over the Arab world and beyond.

Then they found out it was done by a Jew, and the tone changed a bit. As in, threats and recriminations, insults and curses. You can check out the comments below the video at the link and see for yourself; we’re not going to repeat them.

For some of these people, they can’t even agree with an Israeli that Qaddafi is a joke. Amazing.

But of course, the New York Times’ story on this thing doesn’t get into that part. It just talks about the feel-good fact that Arabs initially liked something an Israeli did – at least until they realized he was an Israeli.

Roland Shirk at Jihad Watch has this about right…

Notice the pattern: Muslims take initial delight in the fruits of Western technology and political philosophy: If it had been left up to Muslims to invent the Internet or even the personal computer, neither might have existed for thousands of years. Thanks to their theologically-driven rejection of scientific causality (It “chains Allah’s hand”!), Muslim countries don’t invent anything, and even have trouble using the technology they pilfer from us. I’m astonished at the simple incompetence of ordinary Muslim terrorists to pull off terrorist bombings without their equipment backfiring or misfiring. We can thank that, and God, that thousands more don’t die every year in attacks like the Times Square bombing. (9/11 relied on box-cutters and the one technology Muslims have mastered—murderous self-destruction.) Then the Muslims discover an Israeli was behind the satire, and they start barraging its author with hate mail; whatever their feelings about Qaddafi, Jewish “pigs and monkeys” have no business outraging “Arab pride” by sniping at him. Finally, Muslim prudishness leads them to ask the despised Israeli to remove the female dancer from the video—who was dressed no more scantily than any belly dancer I’ve seen perform. Maybe the problem was that she was also skinny, blonde, and hot….

This microcosm of Muslim-Western relations tells us what we have to expect from the whole ongoing Arab revolution — initial, surface embrace of Western innovations and rhetoric, followed by xenophobia, resentment, and hypocritical Islamic puritanism . . . and the fact that the truth will be spun by the New York Times in the most pro-Islamic manner possible. It’s almost enough to ruin the fun of watching the video. But not quite, so go ahead, enjoy.