Why do terrorists attack America and it's allies? Don't tell me because of some patch of desert in Israel. Don't tell me it's over religious differences and they're "evil doers". What does our country REALLY do to get these people so fired up? I really have no idea. The popular media doesn't really address it.
because they are brainwashed by religion, and living our materialistic, technologically-advanced, sexually charged lives is in direct contrast to their God's teachings.
This lifestyle is taking over the world, and seducing normal God-fearing people. Also, through our foreign policy, we've been able to control muslim governments and move people away from Allah.
If they kill us all, it will get our government to leave those countries first of all, and second, might get us to stop being such heathons.
Because their life sucks and ours doesn't
They live in poverty, the threat of disease or famine is ever-present. Their only solace is in the fact that if they live a good life, if they suffer and STILL say that God is Great, then they will be rewarded by gpoing to Heaven.
We live pretty high on the friggin hog. We complain when a cell phone call gets dropped and weep when a child 3000 miles away is killed by a falling piece of plaster. We don't spend our day thinking that if we live well we will be rewarded in the next life, we try to make THIS life better for our children, for our brothers and sisters, and for ourselves.
It's not about oil or religion or history, it's about pride. They are so proud of their beliefs that anyone who goes against that is wrong and deserves death. I say fuck'em all
US ignores the real world at its peril
September 7 2002
As long as America dismisses its enemies as merely "haters of freedom" it will remain a target for terrorists, writes Noam Chomsky.
September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the United States Government does in the world and how it is perceived.
Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good.
It is also the merest sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms", as President Bush, said, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons.
The President is not the first to ask, "Why do they hate us?"
In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people". His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: the US supported corrupt and oppressive governments and was "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region.
Post-September 11 surveys in the Arab world reveal that the same reasons hold true today, compounded with resentment over specific policies. Strikingly, that is even true of privileged, Western-oriented sectors in the region.
To cite just one recent example: in the August 1 issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review, the internationally recognised regional specialist Ahmed Rashid writes that in Pakistan "there is growing anger that US support is allowing [General Pervez Musharraf's] military regime to delay the promise of democracy".
Today we do ourselves few favours by choosing to believe that "they hate us" and they "hate our freedoms". On the contrary, these are people who like Americans and admire much about the US, including its freedoms. What they hate is official policies that deny them the freedoms to which they, too, aspire.
For such reasons, the post-September 11 rantings of Osama bin Laden - for example, about US support for corrupt and brutal regimes, or about the US "invasion" of Saudi Arabia - have a certain resonance, even among those who despise and fear him. From resentment, anger and frustration, terrorist bands hope to draw support and recruits.
We should also be aware that much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the US has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few countries, that meet official US definitions of "terrorism" - that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies.
In the most sober establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999: "While the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states', in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower ... the single greatest external threat to their societies."
Such perceptions are not changed by the fact that, on September 11, for the first time, a Western country was subjected on home soil to a horrendous terrorist attack of a kind all too familiar to victims of Western power. The attack goes far beyond what's sometimes called the "retail terror" of the IRA, FLN or the Red Brigades.
The September 11 terrorism elicited harsh condemnation throughout the world and an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims.
But with qualifications.
An international Gallup poll in late September found little support for "a military attack" by the US in Afghanistan. In South America, the region with the most experience of US intervention, support ranged from 2 per cent in Mexico to 16 per cent in Panama.
The current "campaign of hatred" in the Arab world is, of course, also fuelled by US policies towards Israel-Palestine and Iraq. The US has provided the crucial support for Israel's harsh military occupation, now in its 35th year.
One way to lessen Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be to stop refusing to join the long-standing international consensus that calls for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live in peace and security, including a Palestinian state in the occupied territories - perhaps with minor and mutual border adjustments.
In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under US pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis - perhaps more people "than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history", military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1999.
Washington's present justifications to attack Iraq have far less credibility than when President Bush No 1 was welcoming Saddam as an ally and a trading partner after he had committed his worst brutalities - as in Halabja, where Iraq attacked Kurds with poison gas in 1988. At the time, the murderer Saddam was more dangerous than he is today.
As for a US attack against Iraq, no-one, including Donald Rumsfeld, can realistically guess at its possible costs and consequences.
Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
They presumably also welcome the "Bush doctrine" that proclaims the right of attack against potential threats, which are virtually limitless. Bush has announced that "there's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland".
That's true.
Threats are everywhere, even at home. The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.
Twenty years ago, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading Arabist, made a point that still holds true. "To offer an honourable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination: that is the solution of the problem of terrorism," he said. "When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitoes."
At the time, Israel enjoyed virtual immunity from retaliation within the occupied territories that lasted until very recently. But Harkabi's warning was apt, and the lesson applies more generally. Well before September 11 it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.
If we insist on creating more swamps, there will be more mosquitoes, with awesome capacity for destruction.
If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the "campaigns of hatred", we can not only reduce the threats we face but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously.
Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the bestseller September 11.
Its because of our imperialism and how we support other countries that infringe on their sovereignty. I don't buy into the religious stuff, sure its part of it, but i believe that our government likes to play that part up as propoganda.
What Imperialism do you speak of?
What colonies do we have? In the past 75 years, what have we tried to take over and then strip of resources?
Being an economic power, other countries are forced to be economically aligned with the US, but that is completely different than occupying a country to gain more territory, power, or prestige.
imperialism does not pertain exclusively to the occupation of foriegn lands. it can also apply to the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.
Quote:Towards a new century of American imperialism
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What will be the shape of the next century? And how will the world’s two hundred states apportion the various roles? If some will have more influence than others, one - the United States - is doing everything to maintain its primacy using its economic, military and cultural strength. Unilaterally and for its sole benefit, it intends to fix the rules for the "electronic era" in order to assure itself global electronic mastery in the next century.
by Herbert I Schiller
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How can the United States maximise its current condition of singular power? At the governing level, few question the desirability of pursuing an "imperial policy", however euphemistically it is described. The debate swirls around the best way of achieving it. One of the more "moderate" strategists puts it this way: "The aim of American foreign policy is to work with other like-minded actors to ’improve’ the market place, to increase compliance with basic norms, by choice if possible, by necessity - i.e., coercion - if need be. At the core, regulation [of the international system] is an imperial doctrine in that it seeks to promote a set of standards we endorse - something not to be confused with imperialism, which is a foreign policy of exploitation (1)".
Other American voices are less shy about using tougher terminology in prescribing the United States’ role in the world arena. For example, Irving Kristol, a long-standing theorist of a belligerent conservatism, shrugs off the notion of constraints and takes for granted an "emerging American imperium". This more muscular approach is still diffident, however, about adopting the term "imperialism".
"One of these days", writes Kristol, "the American people are going to awaken to the fact that we have become an imperial nation." He hastens to reassure his readers that this is not an intentional development: "it happened because the world wanted it to happen." Elaborating this curious explanation, he asserts that "a great power can slide into commitments without explicitly making them (2)".
Under his imperium, Kristol sees Europe embracing its dependence on the United States and relinquishing an independent foreign policy. The Europeans "are dependent nations, though they have a very large measure of local autonomy." Something akin, perhaps, to the Palestine Authority on the West Bank? Kristol himself is bemused by what he sees happening. He distinguishes it from the older European imperialism with its brutal overt coercion, remarking that "our missionaries live in Hollywood". But he concludes on a bleak note: "It is an imperium with a minimum of moral substance. While the people of the world may want it and need it now, one wonders how soon they will weary of it (3)." Nonetheless, Kristol is among those who see US global control as an unproblematic condition: rivals can be subdued by one means or another.
However, the most influential view among the American governing class - up to 1997 at least - expresses doubt that full political control can be achieved. Though completely at ease with the idea of an American 21st century, it accepts the necessity of enlisting partners, however temporarily, in running the world. Richard Haass, director of foreign studies at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant to President George Bush, is a proponent of this prevailing view. He writes approvingly of the Gulf war as a model for future policy.
In his book The Reluctant Sheriff, Haass recommends that the United States should be the global sheriff. In his scenario, unlike the policeman, the sheriff is more of a part-time worker. He comes to work when there is a demand to organise a raid on some recalcitrant powers or "rogue states" - that is, areas or groups that do not accept US-imposed arrangements - and he assembles posses of "willing states" as the enforcers. In this mainstream American view, a frontier species of vigilantism is advocated as foreign policy.
How well a "posse" policy will fare in a world with three billion people below the poverty line, and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine. Underlying these strategic outlooks is an uncomplicated reading of the outcome of the cold war. "We won, and the other side not only lost but disappeared (4)." With this interpretation in hand, the geopoliticians weave their imperial reveries
Only you would believe somethign written by Herbert I Schiller. Damn Jews
the jews got us into this!
They hate us cause we have message board parties.
I thought it was because we ruled the world by proxy. And if that's not true, then you're calling into question everything I read on Al Jazeera's website, and that would just be silly
Al Jazeera.net is the only unbiased news organization out there
do they have a message board?
Dude, they not only have a message board, but they have parties at piano stores like, every Ramadan. I didn't know something could kick so much ass
They're going camping next!
Doc Wrote:Is it like a bang party?
The united states and the middle east have radically different ideas about what constitutes a "Bang Party". Most notably, the inclusion of actual explosives.
it all stems from a hatred of the jews and anger that economic prosperity has passed them by.
They wouldn't last 5 minutes at Bar 9.