More concretely, Saudi elites and the Pakistani security establishment have been financing Islamic fundamentalism. As for Israel and the Middle East, here's what Hitchens - whom Yoshie compares to Thomas Friedman - recently had to say:
"I hate and despise Hezbollah and Palestinian suicide-murderers, as they ought to be called, but they'd have to work day and night for years to equal the total of civilians killed in Lebanon alone, or by Sharon alone. Lebanese and Palestinian irregulars are, by the way, entitled by international law to resist foreign occupation that has been internationally condemned. Fact. So when Sharon says—as he did on his visit to Ground Zero—that "there is no good terrorism and bad terrorism," he suggests a tautology that operates at his own expense. All parties to all wars will at some time employ terrorizing methods. But then everybody except a pacifist would be a potential supporter of terrorism. And if everything is terror, then nothing is—which would mean we had lost an important word of condemnation." Nov. 18, 2002 http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2074129