… why our enemies, particularly Muslims, hate us so much, I couldn’t disagree with you more. It’s not because we are on their holy land and it is not because we support Israel. We are different than they are and I think we are a threat to their existence.
You are saying that they hate just because they do? How is it that by being different we are a threat to their existence? That is completely false and only incites more hatred and violence, from both sides. Let’s see a famous example. The leader of the nine-eleven atacks is thought to have been M. Atta, who piloted one of the planes. Unlike the average suicide bomber in occupied Palestine (who is young, uneducated, broke, unable to afford marriage and has no future), this Atta guy was an educated, upper middle class Egyptian who spoke many languages (English, German, Arabic) and had a Master’s degree in Germany. (BTW, how many languages do you speak rankandfile?).
Anyways, my point is that this guy grew up in the context of the Palestinian problem: First, Palestinians were forcefully removed from their homeland in order to make room for a theocratic state for European jews. Second, this new state received and continues to receive countless amounts of money and weapons from the USA, weapons that are used to repress the Palestinian resistance.
While our TV news shows gave us not much more than high-speed chases and celebrity gossip, Egyptian (and other countries’) TV shows have always had uncensored coverage of the atrocities committed in the name of defending Israel against those who want only to recover their homeland from the European jews who took it by force. It’s not surprising then, that even educated people like Atta would hate us, not because we’re different, but because of the extreme injustice commited against the Palestinians with the full support of the USA.
We all have a sense the good should prevail over evil, that even though there are thieves, rapists, and murderers in this world, we know, or at least we hope, that the bad guys are eventually caught, tried and locked up. We perhaps sleep a bit better at night thinking that the bad guys can’t continue to do evil for too long and that they are eventualy stopped. Contrast this with the situation in Palestine. Palestinians had lived in Palestine for centuries, even millenia, in the same way that the English in England or the Hopi Indians in Arizona. However, they were expelled from their country at gun point. It’s true that there was no Palestinian state before, as it had been a Roman province, later a province of the Ottoman Empire, and later a British protectorate. But there has always been a Palestinian nation, a group of people with traditions, customs, ways of life, and a territory that made them different from other Arabs.
But the zionists (jews, mostly Europeans, who want to establish a theocratic jewish state in Palestine by force) armed themselves, staged terrorists acts in the 1940s (they blew up the King David Hotel, killing many), and eventually succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from a big chunk of Palestine and creating their new state.
Now, anybody who believes that evil cannot prevail over good, at least not for long, perhaps hoped that the injustice would be reversed, that perhaps the international community would intervene to prevent this mounstrocity from continuing. But it does continue to this day. Over the years we have been conditioned to think that Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and terrorist are one and the same thing. But there was no violence there in the 1940s, except for that brought by the zionists. Even jews who had peacefully lived in Palestine for generations turned against their muslim neighbors and said to them: “you know you can be killed if you stay; you better give me your house and flee; I will not pay you but I’d be grateful”.
And that large scale theft has been perpetuated since 1948 by brute force and mostly with US funding. Is it a surprise that they hate us? And if they do, obviously is not because we are different. It is because of this great injustice. The Israeli lobby in the US is all-powerful and resourceful; it contributes millions to political campaigns. Do we gain anything by supporting Israel? If anything, we gain mortal enemies and nine-eleven.
We should do a better job of educating ourselves of these issues, and we shouldn’t let our foreign policy be hijacked by special-interest groups like the Israeli lobby.