Martin Luther Al-King?

[25 January 2007 - New York Times - Opinion by Thomas Friedman] The brutally honest Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis, gave an interview from Paris on March 11, 2006, with Dubai TV, and warned of what's at stake (translation by Memri): ''The Arab individual is no less smart, no less a genius, than anyone else in the world. He can excel -- but only outside his society. If I look at the Arabs, with all their resources and great capacities, and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others have achieved in that period, I would have to say that we Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense that we have no creative presence in the world. We have the quantity. We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world.''