Why They Hate Us
By Scott McConnell
Besides figuring out how best to respond, we ought to ponder why we were attacked last Tuesday. For George Bush and most of the media establishment, the answer is simple. We are the victims of unfathomable hatred from radical Arabs or Muslims, people who just hate freedom. "Freedom and democracy are under attack," is how the President put it. Others point more broadly to an implacable Islamic hatred of the West, a hatred that knows no reason. They, the Arabs, or Islamic fundamentalists, hate us for "who we are"—or as one pundit asserted on Geraldo, they hate us because of our "separation of church and state." They are, it would seem, born that way.
Few in the American political class question these bromides. Elsewhere, analysis is a bit more rigorous. On the BBC, commentators are not timid about underscoring the connections between the United States’ Mideast policies (and particularly its indiscriminate support of Israel) and Arab anti-Americanism. Indeed, that is often the centerpiece of their understanding.
And why not? Islamic suicide bombers are not targeting Ottawa or Zurich, Paris or Rome—all located in countries as free, democratic and "Western" as the United States, and all possessing as much or more "separation of church and state." So why us?
Where to begin? In December 1998, President Clinton, hounded by the American conservative establishment over the diddling of Monica Lewinsky (there’s an earthshaking issue for you!), visited Gaza, the poor desert strip on the brink, so it then seemed, of becoming part of an independent Palestinian state. The Oslo peace process was troubled, but very much alive. On the awaited day, thousands of Palestinians skipped work and school, lining Gaza’s dusty roads to catch a glimpse of the President. Five hundred members of the Palestinian National Council cheered lustily at Clinton’s speech, which contained moving references to the Palestinian history of dispossession and dispersal.
After the death of Oslo we’ve had futile attacks on Israeli settlements, Palestinian homes bulldozed, political leaders killed from the sky, orchards uprooted. Per capita water usage (Gaza’s scarcest resource) is almost 7-1 in favor of the Israeli settlers.
Cut to September 2000, as Ariel Sharon, accompanied by a thousand armed paramilitaries, trudges to Jerusalem’s holiest Muslim site to demonstrate Israel’s exclusive sovereignty. Hopes for a Palestinian state had by then been turned nearly to ashes. Sharon’s stunt predictably provoked Arab riots, which the Israelis suppressed brutally. The fuse was lit leading to Sharon’s election as prime minister.
Meanwhile Americans elect a new president, who makes it clear that he couldn’t care less about the Middle East peace process. Perhaps someone in the Bush White House reads intelligence reports (even newspapers would do) telling him how the Palestinians feel about confronting an Israel armed with American tanks, helicopters, missiles. Within months, teenage rioters with slingshots have given way to suicide bombers, and throughout the occupied territories there grows something like a public cult of the suicide bomber.
In August 2001, Egypt sends its top foreign policy official to Washington with the warning that anger against the United States over the abortion of the peace process is rising so quickly that it endangers all American interests in the region. Survival of the region’s "moderate" and "pro-Western" governments, including Egypt’s, is threatened as well. A pop song about foreign policy emerges on Egyptian radio: "America, America, people are in pain."
In Washington, Cairo’s demarche is received politely, and brushed off. By then the American pundit class, operating in an eerie kind of lockstep, begins beating the drums for a new and "decisive" Israeli military action against the Palestinians.
We have begun with Clinton and Gaza, but might have instead told the story of America’s Iraq policy, where the United States followed up its successful Gulf War campaign not by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq (which risked more than a handful of American casualties) but by trying to embargo the Iraqi government into submission. The results: Saddam’s vicious regime survives, and UN officials estimate that more than a million Iraqis (half of them children) have died from embargo-related causes. This policy is now reviled in the Arab world, perhaps especially in those countries who allied themselves with the United States during the Gulf War.
Let’s assume that Osama bin Laden is behind the horrific terror, and has been plotting attacks against the U.S. for years. But surely the growing rancor toward the United States throughout the Middle East and Muslim world has crippled American intelligence capacities, deprived us of needed allies and potential warnings, and made the fight against the evil that much more difficult.
[end]
Carl
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