It's pretty normal for coverage of foreigners, especially the "exotic" and "dark" kind, to treat them like weirdly inhuman aliens with their own bizarre customs that Merkins just can't understand. It's one thing - still bad - to cover people this way when they actually have some distinct customs. But sometimes... they're just like us! And that's still treated as something impossible to understand.
I can't find it now (google is basically useless for that type of thing these days) but back during the early days of our glorious adventure in Iraq, there was one particular story about how Arab men have this weird code of "honor" and because of that they tended to get upset when soldiers burst down their doors in the middle of the night and shoved their faces into the floor. Very humiliating, you see, because of this bizarre sense of "honor."
