>So what is your point?
I think the article made a good point and I hope you (and everyone else who read it) learned something new which can only help in understanding this situation, you see education furthers the mind. And the way to fight the enemy is to understand him what makes him tick and makes him willing to blow themselves up. Without that, all these cries of nuking, obliterating, cutting off and other war cries are pointless and they don't get to the root of the problem, I understand they make us feel good, united, patriotic and all that but what blind passion for revenge and action will do is make us exactly like them and we should be above the lunatics, we are Americans afterall!
Here is another article that is a MUST read, you will learn WHY Arabs hate Americans:
Why Many Arabs Hate America
by Scott McConnell
September 12, 2001
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy – before today, the
most traumatic event for Americans in my lifetime – Malcolm X said
"the chickens have come home to roost." Malcolm was reportedly
gleeful and rancorous, and his audience laughed at his words: he
meant to convey that Kennedy's death meant very little, compared to
what whites had done to his people. But the phrase would not be
inappropriate today – if said in sorrow – after thousands of innocents
were killed in the worst terrorist assault in American history.
Whether the World Trade Center perpetrator is Osama Bin Laden, or
one of countless Arab or Muslim subgroups, we should not have any
doubt: this attack was welcomed in much of the Arab and Muslim
world. Palestinian leaders may have given it pro-forma condemnation,
but the people on the Arab "street" were smiling and flashing "V" signs
when they heard the news.
Before Americans set their sights on revenge, (and revenge is
expected, and necessary) they should at least understand why this
attack delighted many, why United States foreign policy makes it
hated in much of the world.
The reasons were spelled out in part last month by Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak's foreign policy advisor Osama Baz. He came to
Washington carrying the urgent message from the Arab world's most
populous state: the United States would face mounting rage in the
Middle East unless it did something to diffuse the escalating
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He was received politely by Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and
otherwise more or less ignored. A month before, Senator George
Mitchell's carefully modulated plan for a Middle East cease-fire, which
incorporated a freeze on new Israeli settlements in the Palestinian
territories, had been allowed to die on the vine after Israel said no dice
to a settlement freeze. America's unanimously pro-Israel pundit class
paid no heed to Baz's visit, instead using their columns to shill for an
Israeli military reoccupation of the West Bank, supposedly to solve
Israel's terror problem once and for all.
But the United States, supplier of the tanks and helicopters and
rockets which Israel uses to control the West Bank and assassinate the
odd Palestinian leader, cannot opt out of the Middle East peace
process. By its large scale arms shipments and financial subsidies to
Israel, it is already engaged. It is a key partner. The Oslo Peace
process has aroused Palestinian hopes for a viable state, and one can't
imagine that they would relinquish them now. In his attempted
mediations, Bill Clinton eloquently gave voice to the reasonable core
of Palestinian aspirations. Now George Bush, whose knowledge of the
Middle East seems little deeper than what he picked up from a ride
with Ariel Sharon on a helicopter, has decided to snub the Arab world.
Israel and Palestine is not the only issue which arouses Arab rancor.
The embargo on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, organized and led by the
United States, and now ten years old, is responsible, UN officials
estimate, for the death of more than half a million Iraqi children.
Saddam Hussein – one of the world's cruelest tyrants, bears no small
measure of responsibility for the current horror in Iraq. But while
American policies have left him in power, they have done grievous
harm Iraq's weakest, the old, the sick, the very young. Americans
don't read or hear much of this – it is not on their front pages or TV
screens. But there now must be at least tens of thousands of Iraqi
parents who know that their children are dead because of the
American embargo. It creates a sentiment – now widespread
throughout the Middle East – which allows for the perpetrators of
today's horrific deeds to be recruited.
America's airwaves are alive now with ordinary people calling for
vengeance against this most vile of attacks. I don't feel differently, and
if I had lost a loved one, would volunteer for a revenge mission
myself. But we shouldn't delude ourselves about why there is so much
hatred for the United States. It does not come out of the clear blue. It
is not because we represent freedom and virtue and light, while the
Arabs stand for darkness and repression. American culture may
represent something corrosive and immoral to certain Islamic
sensibilities – that can't be helped. But that isn't what provokes suicide
bombers. American policies often kill, directly and indirectly – and this
is why people are willing to sacrifice themselves to kill us in return. |
