They can't see why they are hated

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.

Let me format this properly.

This is true but it also was an intrinsic Reagan strategy to bringing down the Soviet Union. I say, good for Ronnie. Of course you wouldn't know what realpolitik is now would you? Kind of lacks the symmetry that you get in your everyday life. While you get up, make your breakfast and put out the garbage (I'm sure difficult and challenging tasks for you), nation-states must make the hard and oftentimes apparently asymmetrical decisions necessary in the world of real politik.

Has there been hypocrtical behaviour by all nation-states? No doubt. For example, the U.S. was sucked into supporting the Bosnian Muslims, and the KLA in Kosovo, the latter, pan-Albanian Muslim thugs, against a sovereign European nation-state, the former Yugoslavia. A country which never did anything to harm the U.S. and indeed provided the most effective resistance in Eastern Europe to Nazism.

Unless, however, you are prepared to exercise your cranium in a more subtle fashion to recognize that niceties and pat decisions aren't always there (or self-evident for that matter), you will be unable to exercise the sound judgment necessary to attack the evil of pan Islamic Fundamentalism internationally including the dismantling of this Taliban by force if necessary. Moreover, the Guardian has been one of the most spineless anti-Israel rags. On the latter issue, they are particularly corrupt and amoral in their regular condemnation of Israel. Hence, I give little consideration to this band of whore-mongering scribes.

Post #124--a wise and thought provoking statement.

You wrote: "...We must realise who our true enemies are and who our natural allies are..."

This is an expression of binary thinking that afflicts an entity that has no idea WHO and WHAT it is any longer and takes refuge in simplistic morality plays when it's Ruling Plutocracy gets itself into trouble.

Before we can understand The Other we must know who we are. When a People are confindent in the knowledge of Who and What they are, they can avoid the binary thinking that afflicts America right now.

Who is primarily responsible for the cultural chaos that afflicts us right now? Yes. That's right. The same globalist/consumer-capitalists who are now speaking the language of "evil" and "retribution". These are religious terms that cannot be pumped full of meaning after they have been de-constructed by busy little demolition men.

Yes. One of the enemies is clearly Islam. But who has been arming, training and using them? Someone wrote yeaterday on another thread that the "World Trade centers were America's mecca." Did you think of them that way? I didn't.

We have seen an enemy and while he is presently gleefully shouting "Allah akbar", might there not be another enemy crouching near-by who looks a lot like us?

Thank you very much for your thoughtful responses in the face of all that jingoism and kneejerk chauvinism. Nevertheless, I think the article is pure nonsense - the author never does explain convincingly why Americans "are hated", as he puts it. I don't know either, but I think it would be useful to know the minds of these terrorists. We know for certain that we are hated for our support of Israel, but what else? I suspect, and again I don't know, that the reasons are cultural and not economic or political as the author wishes - we are hated by these religious fundamentalists for being a culture of death, for abortion killing fields, for Hollywood violence, for Hollywood foul language, drugs and so on. Perhaps I am projecting my own feelings about our cultural decline, perhaps not. (Let's emphasize: this is not to explain, excuse or sympathize!!!)

Still, as we have seen from the exchanges on this forum for the past two days, this is not a good time for reflection, and that may be how it should be, the nation is at war.

The better question is not WHY we are hated, but Who is it that hates us. Fanatical religious extremeists who hate America FAR MORE than they do Israel. We are the great Satan because our freedom is opposed to their ideology. The 2 cannot co-exist. It's us or them. They want the middle ages back. The "Root Cause" of this are spineless fuzzy brained airheads who speak of root causes. People with retarded maturity levels. The cure for their behavior is a red,white and blue rage that isn't quenched until the last fanatic is dead. These mobs must be taught a lesson lest our children become their victims. People have a choice, WE ARE GOING TO LEAD. They can follow or get the hell out of the way.

Well, one reason among many that "they hate us" is the incessant stream of anti-American propaganda that has been drummed into much of the world's heads since the Cold War. "They" hate us largely for things as inchoate as "arrogance," which translates into "power," and that hatred translates into "envy" and "jealosy." No country's foreign policy is faultless, and certainly we've made our share of mistakes, although support of Israel is so thoughtlessly assumed to be one of those that I would enjoin the terrorists' apologists on this thread to do a little thinking themselves.

That said, the "nuke 'em all" approach is equally emotional and unthinking. We must kill the killers, but to kill street demonstrators for cheering our dead is merely to pick the final rotten fruits of five decades of relentless propaganda. These people hate us, but we do not hate them.

As for accusing the United States of having "rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest," that is a perfect example of the sort of vague, sinister accusation that smacks of cant more than accuracy. Does anyone, anywhere ever do otherwise? As for the deployment of troops worldwide, is it not the principal domestic accusation that we do not do so with sufficient regard to national interest?

Accusing anyone of acting in self-interest is simply silly, and is most often done out of the speaker's own sense of self-interest. The Guardian's staff here decry the lack of restraint on U.S. policies that was provided by the Soviet Union and might, in their perfervid imagination, be provided by a "system of global governance." These are the words of a putative and hopeful looter, nothing more. They decry matching violence with violence, but are answering that with a call for matching tyranny with tyranny, not, in my view, an approach likely to be much of an improvement.

What I find impossibly naive is the attitude "well, now we've punched you in the face, perhaps you'll see things more our way." Can anyone motivated by anything more than hostility and wishful thinking really imagine that the cause of the Palestinian state is advanced one millimeter by the murder of 5000 innocent Americans? Mr. Arafat knows better.

While the Guardian's "j'accuse" is old news, its timing is, to say the least, indiscreet and thoroughly offensive, and far from balancing the scales of opinion, it only serves to further polarize its audience. For evidence I offer the range of opinion in this thread.

Ok Traitor Scum!

The United States' foreign policies have ticked a lot of people off, including a fair number of Freepers. Anti-American terrorists don't go to the effort of training their people to fly planes full of Americans into large American landmarks just for the fun of it. They do it for a reason. If that reason is our support of Israel, they may be disappointed by our lack of a change in policy in response to their killings. But there may be other policies in place that deserve serious review if we're going to avoid seeing other American landmarks destroyed and other Americans killed.

You can be ticked off, but that is a far cry from mass murder. The US can have any foreign policy we want without innocent civilians being killed by people who disagree. I will not modify US policy to placate terrorist.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

the US Establishment, April 19, 1999

Reviewer: mal living_helios@hotmail.com from Australia I have read this book three times! It never ceases to surprise me. Quigley traces the evolution of the Establishment in the 20 century via his access to restricted documents in several countries including the USA. He mentions the roles played by foreign policy think-tannks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs influence in shaping the respective policies of these countries ie: USA and UK and their failures such as the Great Depression, appeasement of Hitler, their successes such as the domination of the executive government of USA, the foundation of the UN by using socialists and communist spies like Alger Hiss - Machiavelli at work- Here, he elaborates that the Elite seeks a Globalist Government divided along regional lines.

Moreover Quigley sees the Elite as a Clear and Present Danger to Americans and the world at large , this propels him to write the book in question. A more systematic reference can also be found by reading the Bertram Gross' Friendly Fascism which corroborates Quigley's view on the Elite's need for a Globalist government via International Institutions and Agencies like UN, IMF, World bank etc.

For information is available even as we apeak from THE COMMISSION ON GLOBAL GOVERNANCE at http:www.cgg.ch/ and the growth industry of GLOBALIST ISSUES.

Read also in tamden with Foundations: their power and influence by rene wormser and a series of monographs by sociologist G. William Domhoff to further corroborate Quigley's view of the 20th Century. - to the tragedy, we are the hope-

You're getting slammed pretty hard here (no surprise). I think I recognize your screenname, and I don't remember you being a liberal or a collectivist, so I will not join in unjust accusations that you are "pro-terrorist" and such.

I actually agree with you (and this article) that there is a lot of ignorance, blindness, and hypocrisy on display among tha American public and the media these l;ast few days, and I wince when I see corrupt politicians talking about "taking action." They have as much innocent blood on their hands as these terrorists do. Also, I saw the despicable Colon Powell state that the world would stand together against terrorism. He mentioned specifically thugs like Blair and SChroeder, and even Zemin of China. So, we will stand WITH terrorists against terrorists, huh?

Having said all that, there is something important to remember here. It is not complicated to judge people that do what these terrorists did. They killed thousands of truly innocent people. They knew in their heart of hearts that they were being evil, and that the true Creator was grieved by their bitter hatred. They chose Allah (which is just another name for Satan) as their god, and obeyed him, instead of the one who made them, and their consciences were screaming at them, as they would be in ANY man. They rejected God, in their bitterness and pride. It matters not that they grew up in a dark society, and it matters not that the USA has become an international bully. These men, and all the people that support them, should be beaten back. These Muslim nations oppress and starve their own people, then call on us to feed them, while cursing our God, and the God of our forefathers. If Allah is so great, let Allah save them! I say to them, if your god is so great, don't come to this nation to improve your economic lot - it is a nation built by Christians, and deists from a Christian culture. Turn to Allah, don't turn to the USA. And when you insist on holding on to your worship of Allah, don't expect the USA to be able to help you. We Americans are not all fat, lazy, immoral, arrogant globalists, and if you come to our turf and mess with us, you will find that out.

These terrorists lived in this country, enjoyed our liberty, ate our food, fit for kings, and interacted with friendly Americans. They KNEW who they were killing, and they and their cohorts deserve no mercy. The ones who smashed the planes into the building, are now with Allah in Hell. We should send the rest of them involved there, too.

But, one thing to ponder: many in this nation, including Powell and Bush, cheered on Clinton as he bombed the hell out of Serb women and children because their army dared to fight the Muslim thugs who were taking over their ancient homeland. This is the appreciation the Muslim world gives us for acting as their airfoce for a whole year and murdering Serbs for them. Shame! Shame on the whole world!

God (not Allah) is watching, and His grief will also be His wrath.

"But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. "

The American government likes to lull the American people to sleep with a lullaby that we are bringing freedom, democracy, and prosperity to the rest of the world, but the reality is quite something else. The American government has, in the name of vested commercial interests, backed some of history's worst dictatorships, including those of Batista and the Shah of Iran. Then, when the oppressions and impoverishments committed by these puppets against their people resulted in revolutions, the American people, befuddled, scratched their heads and wondered why anyone in Cuba or Iran could possibly prefer Castro or Ayatolla Khomeini over leaders who were bringing them the benefits of "truth, justice, and the American way".

I've visited a great deal of the world. Some people love us. More do not. It's unrealistic to expect any people to love a nation that imposes, often with force of arms, its values and its gods upon others. You can call it "peacekeeping" all you want; it's still an invasion to those who stop the bullets.

The fact is that we still do not really know who the villian is in New York and DC. We only know that the government and media which has lied to us so many times before is pointing the two minute hate at Osama Bin Laden, a former (if there is such a thing) contract agent for the CIA and a heck of a convenient patsy if a Presidential dynasty that owns a petroleum company wants an excuse to go in and invade a lot of oil wells.

It's clear that the goal of these attacks was to start a war, a war that is most assuredly AGAINST the interests of the Arabs and for the interests of other parties, especially those interested in controlling more of the region's oil.

And while no attack could ever destroy America, it is clear that these attacks are intended to trick Americans into destroying what American stands for. Already we are seeing calls for a suspension of basic rights and due process, indeed the very qualities of American life we point to as our gift to the rest of the world (and justification for our military incursions into other people's lands).

If we throw away the Bill of Rights because racial profiling is "common sense", then we throw away all that America stands for. When we do that, those who attacked New York and DC will have succeeded, even if we hunt them down and kill them.

Absolutely right but this works two ways. Why is it so impossible for Americans to understand that killing a million Iraqis turns all Iraqis into implacable enemies? Or that the knee-jerk support for Isreal's slow strangulation of Palestine has the same effect on Palestinians?

Is it at all possible that the people who gave up their lives in order to attack the United States had lost family of their own? What does it take to impel someone to die for his cause? I can tell you that it takes more than "envy" or "hatred of freedom".

This is the kind of rhetoric we get from the rest of the world when our Country has done so much more than any other to help, save and rescue any other country in need. After WWII we forgave/wrote off billions of debt from most all the European countries devastated by the war. We pumped billions more in an effort to rebuild Europe and Japan. When France was teetering on failure in the '50s we reached out and firmly propped them up and helped save them from ruin. We did what we did because it was the right thing to do.

Is there any doubt why Britain supports us? They know a friend when they see one. Much of the world sneers at us and spits bile on us. Oh we get half-hearted statements of condolence from most while they rub their hands in glee at our loss. Some are completely silent, yet we support them.

The world needs to know that things changed drastically on Tuesday. The world will never be the same again. You either stand with us or against us. There is no middle ground. God help those that stand against us.

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