Why are these guys so pissed at the US?

[attila]

That's what my wife asked yesterday. Hard to answer. But it seems like American foreign policy has a bad track record when in comes to the middle east. Not going to go into the partition of Palestine. But is seems we backed the wrong bunch of guys who went on to make a bad thing worse. With the help of our tax dollars and military hardware. Remember the Shah of Iran. He was our stooge. And Iran has been pissed at us since.We couldn't go to war with Iran so we backed a little general in Iraq, gave him lots of money and military weapons so he could win the war as our proxy.And he was a right bastard. Still remember when he gassed the Kurds at Halabja with chemical agents and the US vetoed the UN resolution condemning the action. He must have thought he was invincible. Saddam Hussein is his name. And he is still there.The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan was another quaint little war where we backed anybody willing to go and kill as many communist bastards as possible, loaded with CIA dollars and the best technology we could donate to the cuase. One of them was a really crafty guy and he vowed jihad on the infidels attacking his muslim brothers. Hard to believe now that we built and armed Usama bin Laden's faction. It came as a surprise when I read that we had pinpointed a camp and cruise misseled it to the ground, only because we knew exactly where it was-- because we helped him build it.

How long can we put up with this **** . How about a repartition of the middle east? Hell we did it before. How about we cut a chunk and give it to the Palestinians, help them out with infrastructure, mabe put a big *** wall between them and Israel, and promise to bomb the **** out of them if they don't behave. I know, that will never work. Rant, rave,grumble.
My heart goes out to those who have lost their loved ones. I hugged my daughter today like I have never hugged her before. It struck me that this is how so many people around this violent world feel every single day they live. We are still the lucky ones...

[HilandDoug]

Remember that there are 3rd world countries that teach their children to hate America and all Americans even before they are taught to speak. Our schoolkids say the Pledge of Allegiance, theirs chant, "Down with America! Death to Americans!" How do you combat that?

Nostradamus called this a long time ago. Do a search, and you'll be suprised what you find.

[Event Horizon]

US foreign policy for a long time was to fight communism. It was a bi-polar world and the only objective was to stop communism by any means necessary. Even if it meant backing those who were just as bad or worse. During this time (cold war) as long as you were anti-communist you were ok in the eyes of the US. Now the world has changed dramatically and so has US foreign policy. I believe the goal of US foreign policy is to maintain stability in other parts of the world so we can protect our vital interests. Sometimes in this process of protecting our vital interest others get stepped on. That is just a factor in why some people get so angry at the US.

[veeco]

I suppose you're talking about this:

>Nostradamus' prediction on WW3:
>"In the year of the new century and nine months,
> From the sky will come a great King of Terror...
>The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.
>Fire approaches the great new city..."
>"In the city of york there will be a great collapse,
>2 twin brothers torn apart by chaos
>while the fortress falls the great leader will succumb
>third big war will begin when the big city is burning"
>
>* NOSTRADAMUS


This is a hoax:
http://www.nostradamus-repository.org/cityofgod.html

[its_me_mango]

there are many reasons: the gulf war springs to mind, we bombed iraq or iran last year and then there are several long standing issues, one: their religion demands a jihad, and then there's the ordinary guy who is just trying to elk out an existance - getting water for the day, finding something to eat, and he doesn't want to create waves so when the major man says, get america, they do it. there doesn't seem to be any logic to it, but there is sort of a twisted logic. it's tragic because in the minds of many people from the middle east, we seem like billionairs all going to work in beautiful office towers and we wear nice clean clothing etc, but what they don't see is that every day after work, the same people get into buses and trains (wealthy people generally don't take buses) and go home to mortgaged houses in small towns and eat regular stuff and use ivory soap and go to sleep at 8:00 a.m., it's quite different from what they imagine.

[edew]

Originally posted by HilandDoug:
<STRONG>Remember that there are 3rd world countries that teach their children to hate America and all Americans even before they are taught to speak. Our schoolkids say the Pledge of Allegiance, theirs chant, "Down with America! Death to Americans!" How do you combat that?
</STRONG>

You go there and provide lots of niceties. You give those people what their government can't. You buy them off. Look, we budget $300Billion A YEAR for our military. Can we drop a one-time lump sum of $30Billion in that region? Do you think such a sum might buy off the "America is the devil" and turn that into, "Hmm...maybe America isn't so bad after all..." You don't think a $30Billion propaganda blitz, coupled with lots of goodies won't change people's mind?

[Moonitic]

Why are they mad? Because that's all they know. When something happens to innocent people in another country, none of us cheer in the streets. We mourn. Our hearts hurt (well, most of us anyway). We're taught to CARE.

They aren't. Caring is for the weak to them. Our helping shows that we're pushovers, not that we're strong. "Compassion" means little.

If that's the kind of "god" they serve, they can keep it. Thank Jesus that I have one that teaches love & compassion!

[Iwant2bafencer]

Well said Moon. Well said. I'm just kind of reflecting on everything today. So I probably wont say anything tonight.


------------------
Carpe Diem

[Foil Girl]

Originally posted by Moonitic:
<STRONG>Why are they mad? Because that's all they know. When something happens to innocent people in another country, none of us cheer in the streets. We mourn. Our hearts hurt (well, most of us anyway). We're taught to CARE.

They aren't. Caring is for the weak to them. Our helping shows that we're pushovers, not that we're strong. "Compassion" means little.

If that's the kind of "god" they serve, they can keep it. Thank Jesus that I have one that teaches love & compassion!</STRONG>

I don't know what ties you have to the Israelis or Palestinians, Moon, but... *sigh* never mind, I'm not going to start an argument and take my own advice. Not ALL Palestinians were dancing in the streets... All I'm asking is not to generalize, but anyhoo. Why is a good question, and so deeply rooted in some places that now there is NO reason anymore other than to hate us. I pray that the world will come to an understanding at some point, though I doubt it will happen... Everything's so complicated..

[damianip]

It's not about Islam specifically. It's about the dangers of any church-state. If a government wants to achieve specific goals by any means necessary, you usually have a moral or ethical center in that country which opposes this, typically led by the clergy.

What's bad is when religion and state combine, and the ambitions of the government are no longer moderated but rather encouraged by the state religion, even reaching the point of guaranteed salvation if an individual is killed in the achievement of these goals. I offer as examples the current jihad, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, etc. etc..

None of these inhuman activities were consistent with the fundamental tenets of their religious backers, but from their Ivory Towers, blessings were given, founded on an "ends justifies the means" philosophy. Religion has been twisted to terrible purpose.

These extremists have the backing of their governments and the blessing of their religious leaders. Why shouldn't they be willing to kill innocents and die in the process? They have been guaranteed salvation.

The American sense of individualism, independence and freedom threatens the power these leaders wield over their people by suggesting that they, the individual, should decide on their own what is right and wrong (even if they choose incorrectly).


Paolo

[ 09-12-2001: Message edited by: damianip ]

[Cyranox11]

Uh... Go figure!

They can't see why they are hated

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>

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.

[ 09-13-2001: Message edited by: Cyranox11 ]

[lochinvar]

Thank you, Cyranox11, for being the apologist for terror: i.e., "You had it coming because you are economic oppressors of the world." I'm not sure that's what you intended, but that was the message received.

Ed: Why do they hate us?
Ans: Because we have, and they have not.

It's that simple.

Their lives are mean and miserable, while we live (apparently) in the lap of wealth and luxury. And, by any objective measure, there is no particular virtue by which we have earned our advantage; rather, it has been handed to us by chance of birth and placement.

I have, myself, felt the twistings of resentment and anger when another has been lucky enough to fall into that which I have been working for but have been unable to achieve. And the resentment was/is directly proportional to how desperately I wanted whatever it was that he got and I didn't.

How much worse would it be if I were to watch my children's bellies swell with malnutrition, my wife waste away from ameobic dysentary, and know that there are others in the world who, through no effort at all, have clean, healthy, food-filled lives?

Yes, we all know that life is unfair. Some of us know it better and more intimately than others.

And we all know that we shouldn't hate just because others are more fortunate than us.

But, as was said in the movie Moonstruck, "I'm not a monument to justice." I'm human.

And so are they.

[Moonitic]

I was speaking DIRECTLY about the people who did it, & the people who were celebrating. I KNOW there are those who did not celebrate, & think that what happened was horrible. Unlike some people, I do not choose to lump them ALL together. I'm sorry if I did not make that clear enough.

Who was I really talking about: The terrorists, & the ones who support them.

Please, NEVER assume that I'm bigoted or racist, or whathaveyou...because that is commpletely & utterly WRONG. By the way, there are disgusting creeps in ALL races, creeds, religions, fencing clubs, etc. I direct my comments where they deserve to be directed, not the innocent ones.

By the way, I accept your apology for generalizing ME. I know what you thought of me for what I said, & you're wrong.

[attila]

Lochinvar

My opinion is closer to Cyranox's than yours. You may not like his "apologist" bent ,but a simple look through history will bear his point out. Pretending that people just wake up one day and decide to hate somebody else is simplistic at best, idiotic at worst. Besides if simple envy is what bothers some, they usually find a way to get here. There is a lot more at work here. Get past the denial. Because--one upmanship dictates-- the next set of bastards will probably bring a nuke. I am a horrible pessimist, and think this it's inevitable.

[attila]

Lochinvar

My opinion is closer to Cyranox's than yours. You may not like his "apologist" bent ,but a simple look through history will bear his point out. Pretending that people just wake up one day and decide to hate somebody else is simplistic at best, idiotic at worst. Besides if simple envy is what bothers some, they usually find a way to get here. There is a lot more at work here. Get past the denial. Because--one upmanship dictates-- the next set of bastards will probably bring a nuke. I am a horrible pessimist, and think this it's inevitable.

[lochinvar]

So, what are you saying, Ed? That we had it coming to us? That we somehow "deserved" it?

Is that what you really think?

[ 09-13-2001: Message edited by: lochinvar ]

[attila]

Hi Lochinvar

Not saying that at all. My point is that the people that hate start with a cause and effect event.If we can't figure out what the "cause" is that makes people like them take the terrorist way,there is no hope of finding them and stopping them from doing this again.
We are just the same as they are. We are just human beings. Just like when Japan hit Pearl Harbor we went after "them"-- and even our own citizens who had ties to "them".Remember the Disco in Germany that was bombed, well we went after "them" and bobbed the wrong guys.Killed Khadafys daughter and chalked it up to collateral damge. Kenya? We went and bombed a pharmaceutical factory killed a mess of people and still refused to apologize when most figured out it was a mistake. I could go on , but it depresses me.

[attila]

Hi

yes, we are just like anybody else. I just got off the LATIMES.COM. Attacks on "them" have begun in our country. Attacks on many people who happen to look like a muslim are widespred. They are citizen just like us, no ties to any of these terrorists but guilty by assumed association. Retribution. Just so we can feel better. See, the world has'nt changed at all. Same crap, different day.

[lochinvar]

Ed, it seems you’re arguing my point for me.
And it doesn’t sound to me like your view is as close to Cyranox’s as you thought.

I guess it depends on which question you are really asking.

I assumed it was the one in the heading of the thread: “Why are these guys pissed at the US?”
As to that, I stand by my original answer. And from what I just read, I think you do, too.
We aren’t the Shadow, so we don’t know for SURE “what evil lurks in the hearts of men”…but we can make a pretty damned good guess. It’s that same evil that, potentially, lurks in ALL our hearts, if we’re honest with ourselves.

If, on the other hand, you are really asking “What would make these guys STRIKE OUT at the US?”, that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

I agree with what I think you said, there has to be some trigger event that turns whatever beef they have, or think they have, with us into bombs and bullets instead of marches and chants. But in the end, I have no clue as to what that trigger is, or was in this case. Most of us never get to that point, of turning resentment into action. We manage to keep ourselves under control.

In the end, you have to have both spark AND tinder for there to be a fire.
I was talking about the tinder. You were asking about the spark.

And for that one, I wouldn’t even venture a guess.

[arcon]

[ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: arcon ]