Because some of us tell them to:

As of last April, the late Edward Said's "Orientalism," originally published in 1978, was no. 2 on the best-seller list in Cairo. No. 1was a book arguing that Saddam Hussein hadn't really been executed — all cell phone video evidence to the contrary, the writer argued, was a fabrication of the CIA....

"'Orientalism,'" Mr. Warraq writes, "taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity … encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam." .... Said, Mr. Warraq argues, contributed to the Islamic ideology of victimization, practically inviting offense by writing, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

My first encounter with Edward Said was through one of his columns, available on the website of an Arab-language newspaper. It told the readers Americans hated them, condescended to them, etc, and the Bush administration was trying to do all manner of evil things to them. I'm sure that sounds quite believable coming from an American academic, and doubly so when it places blame for every problem around you on another group of people.

Via Powerline, a nice article on Said's fabrications.