I watched with my partner, Michael, sitting next to me. Michael is a U.S. citizen now, but a native of Syria. He’s an Arab. An Arab-American, in the parlance of hyphenation. And his reaction to the video, described below, is telling.

Michael came to America as an adolescent and learned English with no help from the Los Angeles schools he attended. By the time he and I met, shortly before his graduation from Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas, he had become a fully acculturated American.

When the video ended, Michael and I sat here for awhile in silence. Then he turned to me and asked,

“Baby, are you mad at me?”

No, Habibi (Arabic for ‘my love’), I’m not mad at you. What makes you even ask that?

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll associate me with that.”

Of course, I do not associate him with that. But Michael, now well-acquainted with the psychology of his fellow Americans, intuitively knows what Mr. Berg’s murderers evidently do not. An act of barbarism against one of our own will shock and hurt and repulse and horrify us. But it will also enrage us. If radical Islamists think this act will induce us to cower, they misjudge the American character. We aren’t the French, or even the Spanish.