Why would anyone hate the U.S.?
(Arabs, Islamics, Persians)

Maybe it's because America, despite lovely speeches about bringing freedom and democracy to the world, has a record of backing some of the worst dictators to be found. The US Government, for reasons of commercial interest, backed men like Batista, Pinochet, and the Shah of Iran, despots who drove their people into poverty to enrich American corporations until their people rebelled. Then we befuddled Americans scratch our heads and wonder why those people don't seem to like us very much.

Maybe people hate us because what we call Peacekeepers still looks and feels like an invading army to those who stop the bullets, step on the land mines, and catch the bombs.

Maybe it's because the US Government has executed its foreign policy by tricking nations into fighting each other. Saddam was our buddy once, when he was useful to our policy towards Iran. We The People paid for the Supergun. Our government sold Saddam the first of his biological weapons. Then our government decided they didn't need him any more, told him it would be okay if he invaded Kuwait and declared war on him, blowing up the Supergun and the biological weapons (we hope). Think maybe Saddam carries a grudge? I sure would if I was double crossed like that.

We played the same double cross with Osama Bin Laden, our ally and a CIA contract agent in Afghanistan, funded with $6 billion of YOUR tax dollars, now branded a supervillian worthy of a comic book. Remember the last time our government decided to “take care of Osama?” We blew up an aspirin factory in Sudan. Big joke, that was. You, the taxpayers, not only got to pay for the million-a-shot cruise missiles, you also got to pay to rebuild the aspirin factory when the owners sued the USA, with Vernon Jordan as their attorney! Think the people who worked in that factory (the ones who survived at any rate) like us? I doubt it.

Maybe the reason people in the middle east are willing to conduct holy wars against us is because so many holy wars were conducted against them in the past, going back to the so-called “Holy” Crusades.

Jerusalem was conquered on 7/15/1099 and 60,000 non-Christians were killed. Bodies were slit open to search for gold coins they might have swallowed. Jews who had taken refuge in the city's synagogue were burned alive, thousands of Muslims were chopped to death in Al-Aqsa mosque. According to the Archbishop of Tyre, who was an eye-witness, "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that "even the following summer in all of Palestine the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition".

After rude behavior like that, nobody would be welcome again.

Maybe people are willing to use terror attacks against us because we use terror attacks against them. In 1985, authorized by William Casey, the CIA planted a car bomb near a mosque in Beirut to kill Sheik Mohammed Hossein Fadlallah, a Muslim cleric. The bomb missed the Sheik but killed 80 people, including children. Is it really okay for us to use tactics we condemn in others? No, it isn't. If they are morally wrong to use car bombs that kill innocent people, then so are we.

Or maybe the reason so many people hate us enough to die attacking us is something as simple as growing up watching your playmates blown to bloody bits before your eyes, and picking up a piece of shrapnel stamped, “Made in the USA”. It is silly to think that anyone could endure a childhood like that and remain entirely positive about the USA. Because for all its public talk of peace, the United States remains the largest exporter of mechanized death in the world. And if it is acceptable for the victims of guns to blame the gun makers for their injuries, it must be equally acceptable for the victims of bombs, missiles, and mines, to blame the weapons makers as well.

Bin Laden arrogated to himself the right to champion revenge against the United States for the bloodbath in Palestine. "There will be no peace in America," bin Laden warned, "until there is peace in Palestine."

These frightening words were never widely reported in the North American media, which is filled with uninformed commentators explaining why Muslims are inherently bloodthirsty or anti-western. America's virtual military occupation of Saudi Arabia, its punishment of Iraq that caused at least 500,000 civilian deaths, and Bush's planned jihad against Iraq have enraged the entire Islamic world against the United States. There is little doubt more attacks against American targets will be coming. Such is the cost of empire.