ARAB BASHING is now taking shape in the understandable disgust we have over the ever-increasing price of fuels. Threats of lawsuits and a push for alternatives to fossil fuels are headline news. But who really dictates the price of oil?

Some facts may help widen our knowledge of the problem:

The United States buys no more than 10 percent of its oil from Arab oil-producing countries of the Middle East. It buys more oil from Canada and Latin America.

The best and most sensible solution to skyrocketing gas prices is for each one of us to use less fuel.

The price of oil is dictated to a large extent by U.S. oil companies, which control the worldwide supply chain. More important, they manipulate supply and demand imperatives to fatten up coffers.

U.S. oil companies should build more refineries in the United States to alleviate the increasing demand for refined oil. 1973 was the last year the United States had a refinery built.

Oil prices are pegged to the deteriorating value of the dollar; the more the dollar loses in relation to other world currencies, the higher the price of crude oil and, ultimately, refined fuel. Oil prices will be reduced if the value of the dollar rises. This is in the hands of our Federal Reserve Board, not the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Arab oil-producing countries' national reserves have been devalued significantly because they are invested in U.S. Treasury financial instruments.

In their relations with the United States and other advanced nations, the oil companies no longer oppose government regulation, because most of the regulations imposed on them are supportive of, and increase the profits of, the companies. The regulations fall more into the area of corporate welfare than into good corporate citizenship. In the United States, oil company ties to both major political parties are close and mutually profitable.

Our government ought to fund large-scale research into safer and cleaner energy sources as alternatives to oil dependency instead of waging wars to control the world supply chain, which only benefits oil companies and their lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

Arab and Muslim countries want the U.S. economy to grow. Indeed, it is in their best interests that our nation's economy is stable. With instability, their only source of foreign remittance, namely the sale of oil, will be harmed. By increasing output by a half-million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia is doing its best to bring down prices.

What about the governments of consumer countries, where skyrocketing prices have triggered strikes? With the tax on gasoline based on the price of oil, those governments have been raking in revenues. In Europe, for example, the tax on a liter of gasoline is as much as 70 percent.

Consumer governments could reduce the taxes, and thereby the price of gasoline to the levels anticipated when they drew up their 2008 budgets. In refusing to do so, they make themselves as much a part of the problem as the speculators.

Simplifying world issues by depicting Arabs as bad serves no positive end. It only propagates prejudice and fosters unnecessary animosity.

It does not ease our pain at the pump.

Aref Assaf is president of American Arab Forum, a Paterson-based think tank specializing in Arab and Muslim affairs.