I am truly saddened by the recent move by the Bush administration in restricting visas of Muslim men in 25 countries of which Malaysia is one. Albeit the US is the sole superpower and in fact the most powerful 'empire' the world has ever known, its actions reveal a lack of maturity and a total disregard for the 'freedom' it champions at home.

I have been a fan of the United States and its literary traditions. Its very foundation is built on freedom. Their literary luminaries cherished the freedom to think and write.

Yet Bush has single-handedly reversed all these cherished values. By restricting and imposing a blanket rule on Muslim men, he has offended not merely Muslims the world over but everyone who believes in the freedom of association, belief and more importantly, the right to self-realisation. I am sure Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton and Henry James would quietly turn away from Mr Bush and lament "oh, my fellow countryman overseas!"

Today the US government particularly its president shows a complete lack of cultural understanding and a naivety that is startling. Bush is proving to be a cowboy from the West riding high on a nation that has been wounded and is now ready to strike at anything in sight.

The United States' blind rage is based upon its xenophobia. It prides itself as a society that is a melting pot but what is really melted away is difference. Only in the cities like New York or San Francisco is there any real intermingling of the races. In its heartland, like Texas or the Mid-west, people are savagely insular. The terrorists have struck the wrong place, for the heart of the United States is not in its magnificent cities, it lies in the very bedrock of its interior - a world dominated by ignorance, self-glorification and brutish self-righteousness.

Malaysians, however angry, have no choice but to admit that we want the United States here and that we need them as a trading partner. It is an unequal relationship but today the ugliness of that inequality has reared its ugly head. Three cheers for Bush - the modern Captain Ahab after the new Moby Dick - terrorists and Muslim men.