Photo credit: James May
Summer 2008
Photo credit: James May
The greatest weakness of anti-Western and militant fundamentalist Muslims in the early 21st century is their general lack of perception in regard to Islam's true status and position in the world with which they interact. Muslim claims of U.S. interference in the middle-east in a manner that is humiliating as well as threatening to Islam are completely unfounded. One would think that an anti-Western Islam would realize not only how good they had it before the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq but how much those events were the result of a self-fufilling prophecy induced by the attitude of a large part of Islam in the middle east.
Surveys in muslim countries in the years after 9/11 have shown that a majority of muslims believe that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11 and that Arab terrorists were not responsible. Such statistics are in direct contrast to the possibility that Al-Queda may be a greater threat to the future of the middle east than to the West itself. Certainly Al-Queda bears direct responsibility for the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent deaths of tens of thousands of muslims. While admired by many muslims, Al-Queda in fact is hostile to muslims who do not subscribe to their radical view of the world not only rhetorically and in the form of terrorist attacks but in the form of death that has rained down on muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. thanks to the activities of Al-Queda. In the same manner, Imperial Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor ended up only in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Japan's own citizens and devastation in their homeland. In the instance of 9/11 and without any foe in uniform to fight, the United States simply invaded muslim countries whose rhetoric supported and praised 9/11. If it is true that words kill and that the hateful rhetoric of Islam towards the West resulted in 9/11 then it is equally true that that same rhetoric killed thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, words do kill. Hitler's mindless rhetoric resulted in murderous actions on the part of Germany towards it neighbors and own Jewish citizens and Islam should take note that the unreasoning and unreal nature of Germany's hatred is a common denominator in Islam as is Islam's virulent anti-Semitism.
There are some observers of the situation beween the U.S. and the West and Islam who feel that the gulf between Islam and the West is simply a misunderstanding and that there are 2 sides to the story. Many muslims make vague comments about American foreign policy being to blame for how the U.S. is viewed in the middle east, vague I say because concrete examples cannot be cited. For me the root cause of this is not foreign policy per se but Islam's intransigent hatred of Israel and Jews in general; for me there is not another side to this type of bigotry.
A survey published on the website of the Saudi-US Information Service or Susris for Jan. 18, 2008 has some grim results for how the U.S. is thought of in some Western countries though some surprisingly positive results in others. The total outlook is not a positive one however. To whatever extent Americans have negative views of muslims they seem to be based on terrorist attacks against the West combined with the perception that there is wide grass roots support among muslims for Islamic Fundamentalists. Among muslims around the world, surveys consistently show that there is nothing even close to a consensus that Osama Bin Ladin or muslims were responsible for 9/11 such is the mistrust of the United States.
An International Herald Tribune article by Meg Bortin published June 22, 2006 and run in the online edition of the New York Times stated, "Pew asked respondents to give their opinions of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and it found anti-Jewish sentiment to be "overwhelming" in the Muslim countries surveyed. It reached 98 percent in Jordan and 97 percent in Egypt." Being in Egypt as I write this sentence I can speak for the nearly universal dislike that Egyptians have for Israel; even otherwise quite reasonable and enlightened Egyptians I have spoken with on the subject suddenly shut off their minds when it comes to Israel.
Dr. Azzam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought stated in an online edition of Arutz Sheva Israel National News.com for Dec.3, 2008 that "9/11 has become the biggest blackmail in modern history after the Holocaust. Zionists continue to blackmail Europeans because of the Holocaust while the Americans now blackmail the Arabs and the Muslims because of what happened on 11 September 2001." No one is going to pretend that Arutz Sheva is non-biased on this issue but these types of really idiotic comments are all too easy to come by in the muslim world.
Although the vast majority of muslims in the middle east do not subscribe to violence against the West, their general attitude of anti-Western hostility on a philosophical though not pragmatic level is the fountain from which fundamentalism is fed. Eventually, middle eastern muslims must reject anti-Western sentiments and reject radical fundamentalism; muslims realize no positive gains from their attitude towards the West and in fact, anti-Western sentiment could and has brought them to great harm. Let Japan and Germany serve as examples of what can happen when rhetoric becomes action.
The negative view of the United States in it's foreign policy in the middle east has for decades been totally blown out of proportion by Islamic critics in relation to actual events. In an online article for Cairo's Al-Ahram, June, 2008 issue by Ayman Al-Emir he states, "To accommodate Israeli interests, the pro-Zionist alliance in the US and Europe has worked hard to identify terrorism with Islam."
No entity in the world has worked harder than Islam itself in the matter of the identification of Islam with terrorism; in fact, such groups go out of their way to specifically identify themselves as Islamic. Such propaganda from a journalist is an example of how to fail as a journalist who's job it is to convey unbiased facts as best they can and also how to unwittingly put your readers in harms way because you have not been paying attention to events and have not thought your views through to their logical end.
That article is titled like this:
"Empire's last hurrah
Stupidity and irresponsibility exploded the American empire from within, writes Ayman El-Amir*"
The article begins: " Of all the empires in history, the United States will go down as one of the most aggressive and least inspiring. After nearly 160 years of warfare and imperial conquest, US policy, and the war machine it marshalled, has left nothing in its tracks but death and destruction, with no lasting cultural value." One could easily believe that Mr. El-Amir is in fact talking about the medieval and late medieval empires of Islam itself. I guess all the technological, artistic and medical acheivements of the West in the last 100 years merit the phrase, "no lasting cultural value". In fact the culture of the United States and what it has produced in it's short history has dominated the world in a vast array of areas unprecendented in history and these achievement will redound through the centuries as building blocks of the entire future history of the world. How one can make out the truth to be otherwise requires a great deal of purposeful blindness, jealousy and bias. I'd like to see Mr. El-Amir live without his cell phone, laptop, car, stereo, television and plethora of other things in his daily life that make him an American but without American values and that is his hypocritical failing.
It's hard to imagine how one can pack so much misdirection, distortion, bias and ignorance of history into such a small paragraph as Mr. El-Amir's. One might say it takes a lot of practice and this paragraph may qualify as the shortest science fiction novel ever written, no disrespect to Forest J. Ackerman. One would think America were Nazi Germany.
Since the United States has never had an empire in the true sense of the term the false use of that word alone testifies to the fact that of all the great powers in human history, the United States has used it's military capabilities for naked aggression less than any great power has; Canada and Mexico would surely be occupied by American armies were this not true, with little or no say in their own affairs. "Imperial" and "empire" are words that have been redefined to fit a square peg in a round hole in the latter part of the 20th century they have been so abused.
The fact that Mr. El-Amir refers to a culture that has proved to be one of the most inspiring in history as exactly the opposite speaks to something else going on here than a calm and unbiased observation. If Mr. El-Amir has a negative view of empires it is hard to imagine under what circumstances any military empire would ever be considered inspiring other than to other conquerers. Mr El-Amir's writing has the feeling of a whining, complaining and jealous child who is prone to making things up out of whole cloth. Mr. El-Amir's comments in the entire article are arguably the exact opposite of reality, but unfortunately this view of history is reality in the middle east. In another essay in the same issue of Al-Ahram, a Ramzy Baroud says that the U.S. feels that anyone who opposes the United States or Israel is branded a radical or terrorist. Again, it's hard to imagine a more clouded, biased, self-serving or unsophisticated point of view. Middle eastern newspapers are full of Palestine, Palestine, Palestine; it is a cause celeb throughout the middle east though the presentation of events that have led to that current tragedy are horribly and consistently distorted. Making excuses for failure by simply rewriting history is common in the middle east. If the truth sets you free than it is easy to see why so many anti-Western muslims are seemingly prisoners in their own minds.
Anti-American bias in the middle east is so profound and twisted away from any view of reality that it is hard to see how it can be countered. How can one answer claims that Israel orchestrated 9/11? We in the West can only shake our heads in sad wonderment that entire cultures in a modern so-called information world can be lost in a perceptual trap not to say wasteland. Such cultures with such beliefs manufacture their own humiliation in the eyes of the rest of the world without apparently even being aware of it.
In George Orwell's "1984" the society portrayed had a governmental "Ministry of Love" where people were tortured and a "Ministry of Peace" that was responsible for waging war. The United States itself has occasionally wandered down the dangerous perceptual path limned in "1984", particularly in the Vietnam era, but it has never wallowed in it or totally lost it way as is the seeming case in the middle east; there are too many voices in the U.S. to allow it. In the largely non-secular and undemocratic middle east, there is seemingly too little will and too few venues for voices to turn away from a path that is increasingly intellectually bankrupt as well as increasingly insulated from and hostile to the outside world.
Despite the tragedy of the Palestinian muslims, and the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the death that has ensued in those three situations, Islam still appears to not understand that their own distorted world view has brought them only further humiliation and destruction. Outlets typified by Al-Jazeera in it's early days absolve Islam of guilt no matter how obvious it appears to be. Too many people in the middle east live in a state of absolute perceptual denial and there is no prospect that this will change, rather, the fantastic rhetoric and indoctrination emanating from the middle east simply seems to entrenching itself.
Distinctly Islamic rhetoric speaks to the distorted, uninformed and biased view of history that regularly comes out of the middle east when it comes to the role the West has played in their affairs. I am not suggesting that the middle east did not undergo a succession of occupations by outside empires or that the U.S. has not involved itself in colonial experiments such as the Phillipines. I am saying that in the case of the middle east the United States has had less involvement there than it did in Afghanistan in the 1980's and the Balkans in the 1990's; both cases where the United States supported muslims against non-muslims. The ills the middle east claims to have suffered at the hands of U.S. foreign policy before 9/11 are almost entirely imagined but have so attained the status of an urban myth that the idea of reckless and harmful American foreign policy decisions in the middle east is something that is taken for granted by Islam without a shred of truth to accompany this myth. In the middle east myths take on reality because it is a convenient way to save face and to provide an outlet for hostility that at it's base has nothing to do with the West. In the middle east the myth of the West is composed of words and these words ultimately kill because they are used to whip people into a frenzy of hate that eventually expresses itself into planes flying into American skyscrapers half a world away.
To put Islamic outrage against the West or the United States in particular into some kind of context look at the events surrounding the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese people and other countries in the region have a much larger axe to grind against the United States than any country in the middle east ever has. Comparing the two cultures' reactions to depradations both real and imagined by the West shows one culture, that of Vietnam, as taking the point of view of pragmatic rationalists who realize that what has happened is now is the past and that keeping the memory of that regional conflict and the aftermath that continues to resonate to this very day will accomplish nothing but to harm their own psyche.
In comparison, critics of the West in the middle east come off like whining children who perpetuate a horrible past that never occured. Generally speaking, these middle eastern critics, while espousing a point of view they are quick to point out is globally aware in it's perception is in fact so enmeshed in provincialism as to be astounding. No Wayang Kulit play on the walls of Plato's Cave ever ensorceled it's inhabitants more so than has Islamic Fundamentalist rhetoric regarding the West.
When you see essays written by muslims in the West or middle east defending the 9/11 hijackers and praising them as striking a blow for muslims to live free and with diginity the writers are hard pressed to go beyond this claim and into specifics as to the whys and wherefores about who's dignity and freedom and when. That is because those specifics simply don't exist. Anti-Western Islamic rhetoric resides in a never-never land, the same land where another myth, the myth that the medieval European Crusaders violated the middle east in a manner so awful that it has become practically a genetic memory among muslims is wholly false in so far as the context in which that event is put forward. This urban mythic stature of the Crusaders is so taken for granted that it is even accepted in the West simply because it is put forward in such a matter of fact way. It is all very Orwellian in that a thing that never happened in the first place is not challenged because that thing is so taken for granted and so obvious that no one feels the need to go into any detail or investigation at all. Hard to say whether this is the result of a purposeful Soviet style act of disinformation or whether Islam is so truly deluded. Certainly the idea bandied about in the middle east that America flew it own airliners into skyscrapers it blew up itself and that Jews who worked at the World Trade Center knew not to show up for work suggests an Islam capable of great self-delusion. Common sense, logic and reality cease to have any role to play at all in anti-Western rhetoric coming out of the middle east.
In regards to the theme of anti-Western rhetoric, a Nov. 29, 2008 article from The Independent online edition reporting on the late Nov. terrorist attack in Mumbai, India has the following paragraph: "Ed Husain, director of the Quilliam Foundation, a think-tank that campaigns against extremism, said of the reports of British involvement in the attacks: 'British Muslim leaders need to take their heads out of the sand and begin systematically dismantling the warped theology that has inspired these and other attacks. Unless our government is bolder in identifying Islamism as the root cause of extremism, we will only be responding to and not preventing terrorism. Extremist Islamist groups continue to hold events in England and recruit new followers. Radical Islamism has no place in our country.' "
In speaking of the Mumbai attacks in Nov., 2008, what brings to the forefront a shadow of doom more so than the prospect of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India brought about by the inability of Islam to digest the prospect of living peacefully with it's fellow nationals in a democratic country? Even in Iraq, the prospect of Shiite and Sunni, both muslims, living in a democratic society falls under a shadow because of the fear of one side or another gaining the upper hand in a parlimentary society. Muslims have an incredibly hard time with the idea of a society that is not homogeneous; they seem to feel that their religion and history demand they have the upper hand; even Shiite and Sunni will not share power.
When countries in the middle east had their day in the sun that they were unabashed in their naked aggression against other nations, conquering all they could swallow. Yet to this day people in the middle east write articles about those European Crusaders as if they are a nightmarish cultural memory forever burned in the zeitgeist of the middle east all the while conveniently failing to speak of the preceding five centuries of muslim conquests against which the gains of the Crusaders was a drop in the bucket territorily and temporily speaking. The hypocrisy and disigenuousness with which Islam speaks of the Crusades is monumental.
The reason I and others observers of events in the middle east constantly associate the words Islam or muslim in regard to terrorism or anti-Western sentiments is because it is the one constant that fundamentalist and militant critics of the West in the middle east always include in any dialogue; they always let the world know that they are speaking first and foremost from a distinctly non-secular and Islamic point of view. Fundamentalist or even moderate muslims in the middle east rarely criticize the West from a distinctly secular point of view but complain bitterly about Islam, terrorism and anti-Western sentiment being mentioned in the same sentence. I sometimes wonder if such critics ever even listen to what they themselves say.
Reasoning in the middle east seems to consist of a never never land of distortion, propaganda and indoctrination eagerly swallowed as fact. How can one ever have a dialogue with cultures that deny basic facts that don't fit in their world view of a Western and Zionist anti-Muslim conspiracy; how do you talk with people who deny the holocaust out of sheer hatred of Jews?
The complete lack of self criticism coming out of the middle east in terms of responsibilty is at odds with the reality of historical events in the region; the fact that one can easily buy a world map in Egypt in 2008 with no evidence of Israel on it speaks to this. Look at the way Egypt and Syria have totally rewritten historical events in connection with their military defeats at the hands of Israel in order to whitewash the magnitude of these defeats shows what kind of mad cultures the West is dealing with. Truth and fairplay are concepts that Islam mentions in it's rhetoric but in fact these concepts are hopelessly compromised. You are talking about normal everyday people who's world view is that of a mad man.
The more one reads newspapers in the middle east the more one can see that anti-West feeling is so fundamental and so delusional that it is hard to see how it can ever calm down since it feeds on events that never took place; reality has nothing to do with it. It is plain to see that people in the middle east who deseminate anti-Western propaganda feel no sense of responsibility for their words in terms of the impact they have had in current events they decry, namely the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those events did not happen in a vacuum of American aggression. One wonders if their is an Arabic word for responsibility so little is it used in a meaningful way in Islamic political rhetoric.
Lack of perception about the role of the United States in the middle east can easily be found in the West as well although it is thankfully far less prominent than critics of the U.S. and her policies coming out of the middle east where the chorus of complaints seems universal. In an online article for the N.Y. Times for June 4, 2008 originally published in 2002 titled "Confronting Anti-American Grievances, former adviser to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, compares the problem of international terrorism to the activities in the 1970's of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Such a comparison is less than insightful. He goes on that the U.S. should treat fundamentalist Islamic terrorism in a similar manner to the way Spain, Russia and England have dealt with internal terrorism in their own regions in a hopelessly befuddled analogy.
Brzezinski seems to not understand the simple fact that the Symbionese Liberation Army, Ku Klux Klan and Black Panthers are fringe groups without any grass roots or other support outside their own organizations. Although actual numbers of muslim terrorists are probably no larger than in these American groups, it is the popular grass roots support, the support in the media, the support among religious figures and in the goverments of many muslim countries that is the overwhelming and crucial difference. This is the reason why the governments and people of the middle east are being taken to task over the issue of terrorism and why there is such danger hanging over the civilian populations of the middle east as witness the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is this very difference which is responsible for why no blame was placed on the governments or people of Italy and Germany for the actvities of the Red Brigade and Beider-Meinhof terrorist organizations in those respective countries. Middle eastern fundamentalist Islamic terrorists will continue to put the civilian populations in the middle east in harms way in the future in a way in which there will be a direct correlation to the success of these terrorists outside the middle east and the harm eventually visited on civilians in the middle east by the West. It is clear that the West is only going to take so much of the hostility originating in the middle east. It would be perhaps a slightly different matter if civilians in the middle east understood that the United States is having it's resolve tested to the breaking point but they seem to not understand this crucial issue at all and will stand bewildered when U.S. smart bombs begin to deliver a payload that will be determined by the success of the very terrorists their own rhetoric, newspapers, TV stations, mosques and governments support.
One would think that anti-Western feelings emanating out of the middle east would have been tempered by the American response to 9/11. Instead there seems to have been no lessons learned at all and this does not bode well for President Obama as there is the distinct possiblity that terrorists will become wrongly emboldened by reading the situation all wrong. If so, it will once again be civilians in the middle east who will bear the brunt of any reaction to terrorist successes because of their rhetorical support.
The reason the Palestinian Arab and Jewish Israeli civilian populations have suffered so is because there is a consensus on both sides of the conflict that there is widespead support among the people of each culture for the military policies of their leaders and therefore bear a measure of guilt. This is the great danger the people of such countries as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia in particular face in direct proportion to the success of Islamic terrorism outside the middle east and probably why Moamar Gaddafy of Libya decided to tone down his own country's rhetoric. Gaddafy clearly believes in the issue I am writing about in this essay. People who live close to that building in downtown Tehran that has bombs and anti-American slogans painted on it may yet come to wish that that building had never been painted in such a fashion and that their government had not decided to confront the United States over basically nothing.
Brzezinski goes on to write that we in the West must come to understand the "complex historical dimensions of this hatred", referring to middle eastern anti-Western sentiment without himself pointing out exactly what this history is. Using the word complex when referring to the wholly unsophisticated and childish rhetoric used in the middle is problematic. No surprise that the negative dimensions Brzezinski is referring to do not exist on a scale that could possibly support the virulent hatred that comes from many quarters of the middle east; in fact, the lack of dimension in this regard is notable. Brzezinski fails to mention the stand America took on the side of muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-90's and the support the United States gave Afghanistan during the Russian occupation of that country as do Islamic critics of the United States; if there were any dimension to be spoken of it would take this form. The United States liberated the country of Kuwait when it was invaded by Iraq but U.S. motives for doing so are considered so cynical that it is as if the event never happened. There is your dimension.
We can only hope that President Obama is not perceived in the middle east as symbolizing a lack of resolve in the same way in which Jimmy Carter was. If he is there will be more trouble in the middle east and a Republican president in 2012.
In short, the conception of the negative role of the United States in the affairs of muslims has either been wholly exaggerated or presented in a less than balanced way. In the case of fundamentalist Islam, the mistake is to believe that there is any kind of balanced or rational debate on the issue of America's role in the middle east coming out of that region or unfortunately, sometimes in the West as well. If one took to heart the anti-American sentiments coming out of the middle east one would conclude that the people there are innocent boy scouts completely minding their own business.
On the question of America acting unilaterally in the middle east one can say this: what else can take place when Europe has turned their back on a situation for which they are wholly responsible for; responsible in the sense of British, French and Italian colonialism in the region and the creation of nations by drawing lines on a map after WWI without regard to ethnic groups. There is a difference between acting unilaterally and acting alone which distinction seems to be hard for some to grasp. How could Europe stand by and let muslims be killed in their thousands in the former Yugoslavia when Serb leadership suddenly decided they would avenge invasions by the Ottoman Empire that took place in the 14th and15th century? Why did America have to take the lead in that sorry debacle? And once again the problem arose because of lines drawn on a map by the winners in WWI, making nations with no regard for ethnic considerations. At that same time, certain nations on the winning side took advantage of the losing nations by availing themselves of chunks of land that only ensured eventual retaliation and conflict when the countries who lost that territory were no longer down and out which is exactly what occurred in Turkey after WWiI but Turkey appears to bear no bitterness whatsoever towards Europe for this event. The rest of the middle east could learn something from Turkey about how to view the past.
In regard to Islam, this lack of perception of which I write has led to a dangerous powder keg of a situation and already claimed countless thousands of lives in just the last few years. Numerous factions within Islam as regards the matter of it's obsessive anti-Western rhetoric has put it seriously out of step with reality and the rest of the world.
Anti-Western rhetoric has led to actions that culminated in the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Violence always starts with words. The U.S. invasions were a mingling of a desire for revenge and to take in hand individuals, cultures and national leaders bent on violence against the West.
I believe it is only a matter of time before Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists detonate a dirty bomb within the United States and if this does indeed come to pass there will be hell itself to pay.
On the scale of nations, a taking in hand can be supremely difficult if not impossible depending on the resolve of the combatants. In WWII, Germany and Japan, aside from the usual piratical nature of erstwhile conquerers, let concepts of Bushido and Nazism lead them into a negative perceptual reality that simply did not exist and it is this particular form of madness that is leading Islam down a path that is an empty cup and could ultimately lead to the deaths of more countless hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of nations before it is over. The energies of Islam would be better directed in more positive ways. The actions of Japan and Germany in the 30's and 40's is a terrible example of the fate that could await Islam in the Middle East if their own people do not take their fanatics in hand before entities like Al-Queda have another success like 9/11. Hopelessly biased and anti-Western journalists in the middle east should think hard on how they will feel when they are standing in the burnt out remains of their own homes and wondering what happened. The lesson of letting a sleeping dog lie has never been more important since Japan and Germany started poking America with sharp sticks at the outbreak of WWII. Guess what happens when you poke a bear with a sharp stick; you're outgunned. Why in the world so many different entities in the middle east would provoke the United States in a contest in which they are hopelessly outmatched on so many levels is a question only they can answer. I can guarantee you this: the Japanese and Germans after WWII wish they themselves had the sense to ask such a question because I can guarantee you they did not like the answer.
It is this exact type of question that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria should be asking themselves now along with many paramilitart Islamic groups because these entities are confronting the U.S. over nothing compared to what they are risking and what they are risking is their very existence. It would not be the first time the United States crossed an ocean to root implacable hostiles from their holes which is what literally happened in the case of Sadam Hussein.
The Iranian government dreams of an atomic bomb that they wrongly believe will somehow ensure their own security as if there is any country in this world that does so. The greatest threat to Iranian security is their own mindless hatred of Jews and the West; in short, themselves.
Civilian casualties mount ever higher in the middle-east; the West blames Islam, Islam blames the West. The question is: who is taking the worse beating and for what? The 9/11 attacks only succeeded in ensuring the deaths of thousands of Muslims. Didn't the terrorists flying those planes into building on 9/11 realize that? What could those broken human beings possibly have hoped to accomplish?
It seems possible that if Islamic fundamentalists did not have such a lofty and unrealistic view of their own cultures' place in world affairs then they wouldn't feel so bitterly slighted. Overweening arrogance seems a term wholly appropriate when listening to anti-Western rhetoric that originates in the middle east; and always the question is where oh where are the voices of moderation and pragmatism in the region. When speaking about anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists, it often feels as if we are talking about a people who are coming from a place of jealousy, self-doubt and an inferiority complex. In speaking of the middle east we are talking about a part of the world that would have no more importance on the world stage than Chile or Guatemala if it were not for oil and Palestine. Countries throughout the middle east have done little to recommend themselves to the rest of the world since obtaining sovereignty other than to cause trouble.
It is like a situation where a person with their first camera steps into a room of professional photographers and demands equality of respect because they are convinced their innate talent requires no experience or body of work and when no respect is forthcoming they are furious. Respect is something that is earned by ones actions and does not come because you put your own shoes on in the morning.
As a useful example and also the source of so much of the turmoil and anti-Western feeling in the middle-east, the Palestinians have, through willful stubbornness, ground themselves into dirt by their simple unwillingness or inability to grasp the reality of their situation.
The Palestinians must bend with the wind in order to move forward. If they don't, they simply have no one but themselves to blame for their continuing predicament. Part of the Palestinian reality is that, no matter how much they wish it, they can now win only by accepting their reality to salvage any kind of a victory and be reborn from the ashes. The alternative is to be consigned to the dustbin of history. The problem for the rest of the world is that the Palestinian/Israeli standoff has itself engendered an incredible amount of anti-Western feeling in the Middle East at large. Unfortunately, the plight of the Arab Palestinians may foreshadow a similar fate for other parts of the Middle East if it does not let go of their largely imagined standoff with the West.
Arab Palestinians that refer to Jews as animals and the Palestinians own willingness to become Martyrs shows that terrible words lead to terrible action and in the case of the Palestinians, only ensures their journey towards self-destruction as a culture. Similar rhetoric in surrounding Islamic countries and directed towards the West together with many terrorist attacks against the West show, in a similar pattern, that words kill.
Meanwhile, the West, initially not as violent as their shadowy Islamicist adversaries, has shown remarkable restraint considering the true balance of power and the provocations of Fundamentalist Islam. If the West were as demonic as some in Islam claim, it would have militarily occupied every major oilfield in the middle-east years ago. One can easily imagine regimes such as WWII era Japan and Germany in the same position as the West is today in regard to a Fundamentalist militant Islam and with nuclear capabilities showing much less military restraint than the West is today; not only did Japan and Germany show no restraint, they followed a path of unprovoked and naked aggression against their neighbors.
To further the parallel, you could take wholesale expulsion of Muslims ala Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries for granted. Modern Islam has no true conception of the restraint they have been the beneficiaries of considering it's provocations against the West and I am taking into account the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Considering the actions of certain nations in the not so distant past, the retaliation against Muslims in their own countries and others could be much, much worse. Islam would do well to understand what actually constitutes naked aggression and not speak rhetoric as if such an event is occurring when it emphatically is not. For militant Islam to continue on a such a course could eventually result in a self-fufilling prophecy as if the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were not already a clue to stop it's mindless hatred of the West.
Militant Islam speaks of the past colonial depredations and subsequent mistrust of the West as if it were a genetic memory burned into them all the while conveniently forgetting when Islamic nations in the middle east and North Africa militarily overwhelmed much of Europe, twice knocking on the doors of Vienna. The Austrians made some croissants and forgot about it. Can you imagine the Austrians bitterly complaining about the 2 Ottoman attempts to conquer Vienna as if it had happened yesterday? Put like this it shows muslim complaints about Crusaders in the light their childish remarks deserve. These are memories, facts and history as well. It was only with decades of effort that Spain, Portugal and parts of France and Italy regained the upper hand while some Christian nations simply disappeared forever into the dustbin of history. Can one imagine the West bitterly complaining for the return of Constantinople?
Here is the problem with Islam's fundamental misunderstanding of the West's restraint: what will happen if fundamentalist Islamicists succeed in detonating a dirty nuclear device within the United States or Russia proper? Far from being any kind of victory for Islam, it would almost certainly be the worst disaster to ever befall Islam. One can imagine a sloughing off of restraint and a vengeance almost too terrible to imagine being visited upon an Islam who has for decades had the wherewithal to dedicate their resources and energies to more peaceful paths. Instead, billions of dollars and man hours have been spent in totally worthless actions aimed at undermining the West. The de facto grass roots support in Islam, embodied in the fact of so many muslims naming their children after Osama bin Laden will come back to haunt civilians in the middle-east who just do not see that words can indeed kill; in fact, those words can rebound and become suicide. If moderate voices exist in the middle east they must take a hand in reining in anti-Western sentiment because fundamentalist Islam seems bent on suicide.
It is not hard to imagine the West saying, "Enough is enough with the Muslims already.", as has already begun to be manifested in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; these invasions were not the result of rational thinking but rather knee-jerk rage. As was the case in the Pacific in WWII after Pearl Harbor, the initial knee-jerk reaction has turned into a cold resolve to get the job done. Enough can be enough.
Should a dirty bomb be detonated outside the middle-east there will be no peace movements in Europe or the United States to exert restraint; instead there will be a call to action, the kind of call to end this undeserved anti-Western stance by Islam once and for all. It is not hard to imagine these things. This is exactly what happened in the 1940's when all restraint was thrown aside and terrible vengeance was exacted, especially by the Soviet Union and the Allies against Germany. In the Pacific War, the U.S. Army Air Force obliterated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and the decision to do so was perhaps made easier because of events like the Bataan Death March and a tactically minor but symbolically huge attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The inability or unwillingness of moderate voices in 1930's Germany and Japan to assert themselves was national suicide. Germany and Japan rolled the dice, counting on moral superiority and the lack of resolve of their opponents to pave the way to the success of their naked aggression; does that sound familiar? If Islamic terrorits should succeed in detonating a nuclear device within the United States then middle eastern Islam as a whole may be rolling nuclear dice. The lack of moderate voices in Islam against anti-Western terrorism is not a good sign. The famous quote of Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."could have been tailored made for the non-appearance of moderate voices in the Islamic world. It is as if it is taken for granted that the United States is a force for evil in the world and indeed this is specifically said by all too many religious Islamic leaders in the middle east.
It is often said by people on in both the middle east and the West that the West needs to understand muslims in order to deal with what fuels terrorism - I say this: for every Israeli who dies in a terrorist attack, 5, 10 or 20 Palestinian Arabs die; for every American who died at Pearl Harbor maybe 2,000 Japanese died; for every American who died on 9/11 how many muslims have died - 50, 100? Who needs to understand who? And so now we come to the idea of a nuclear device being detonated on American soil. I can easily see 100,000 American casualties happening as a result of such a scenario though really no one can know. If this comes to pass, how many muslim lives will it takes to pay that butcher's bill as the result of an American desire for revenge against which Pearl Harbor and 9/11 would pale in comparison as America says, "Enough is enough with these people". Who, indeed, needs to understand who and who needs to back off?
It is not hard to imagine, in this scenario, Tehran, Damascus or even Mecca itself being made to pay a horrible price, a thousand year lesson, for decades of groundless rhetoric and acts of violence against the West long after the end of Western Colonialism; that price the act of hundreds of square miles in the middle east being turned into vast stretches of radioactive glass. This would be the same lesson that was visited against Japan in 1945 for actions that would be considered far less provocative than a dirty bomb exploding inside the United States. I truly believe that Islam does not understand what a terrible gamble they are taking in their senseless and needlessly hostile stance against the West. Japan made the error of awakening a sleeping giant in December of 1941 and whatever you may think of America's foreign policy in the last 50 years, America's so-called "Imperialism", it would pale beside the lessons of WWII and only then would Islam waken too late to the reality of how relatively benign US policy and Western policy in general has really been.
The patience of the West cannot be exploited indefinitely or pushed past a certain point, which Japan and Germany learned to their ultimate horror. A terrible fate could be visited upon Islam that will be nothing compared to Sherman's march to the sea and worse than even a devastated post-war Germany. Only the price Japan paid in August of 1945 may equal it should Osama bin Laden have his way. Sometimes one wonders if a truly violent reaction against Islam is what a madman like bin Laden really wants. Certainly the West is militarily more capable of terrible acts of revenge than is any entity in Islam.
The more Islamic Fundamentalists succeed, the more they are surely setting about to ensure their own destruction. And in the end one has to ask: for what? Already one can ask what 9/11 accomplished for the honor of Islam other than bringing a United States military occupation force to 2 muslim countries? The idea bandied about that Islamic terrorists tenacity will bankrupt the United States is a fools game to contemplate. The possession of ever more expensive oil in the middle east combined with that region's unremitting hostility towards countries with a much greater military capability may come to haunt the region.
The main problem is that militant Islam seems not to truly understand the relatively benign manner in which more powerful countries treat them. I and many others believe that it is absolutely within the power of Islam to rein in terrorism and I believe it is an absolute imperative for Islam to do so. Rhetorical and material support of anti-Western stances is well known within the West and the more successful is this support the more inevitably the middle east creeps towards the very real possiblity of doom. Islamic media outlets, religious leaders and governments within the middle east are playing with fire.
If a terrible fate should envelope Islam one can only ponder what could have been had Wahabbist oil money spent the last few decades to make the world a better place. Then, in comparing that to the selfish, bigoted and militant reality can one readily imagine that much of the world will feel little sympathy for those bent on self destruction fueled by little else than an overweening arrogance and misplaced sense of pride. One must judge oneself by your accomplishments and not by mad dreams of superiority.
Sometimes, in thinking back to the national will power and energies that Nazi Germany spent in waging war one cannot help but wonder what would have happened had Germany directed such enormous energies to the good of mankind. One can then ponder the horrible price of such misdirected energy. Wahabbist Islam should think long and hard on this example.
It is not hard to imagine a coalition of, say, the US, Russia, China and Europe, already thirsty for oil, saying enough is enough and seizing the oil fields of the Middle East. And this could be considered benign compared to what could follow. Oil rich muslims sometimes seem bent on bringing misery to those who are not muslim, attempting to subvert governments and spread a philosophy of hatred and bigotry in addition to the violent terrorist attacks that already have stung the consciousness of the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and Russia. Who will stand up for countries that have made so little effort to engender peace and friendship in the world, instead using their oil money to politicize religion and spread a message of a world eventually overwhelmed by Islam as if such an event could ever happen?
Islamic fundamentalists are not people like most of us who are content to dream of a vacation at the beach or a quiet walk with a loved one. Instead, some methodically plot the downfall of those who have never done them any real harm in the context of historical harsh military reality other than in their own minds. Or, at least, no more harm than Islam did to the West when it had the means and opportunity to do so. Witness the medieval conquest of the entire middle-east, North Africa, Spain, parts of Italy and southern France, Asia Minor, the European Balkans to the gates of Vienna, Sicily, Greece and more which I have already alluded to. Despite this legacy it is Islam who complains of the West as being Crusaders, falsely harkening back to a few scattered towns and castles in Palestine that those Crusaders only held for a century and mostly less than that. A comparison of the Crusades with the extent of territory Islam conquered and holds to this very day is staggering. It is a perfect example of a culture that lives for and in the past, minimizing their own much greater military adventures and maximizing the much less greater scope of the Crusaders. For a Muslim to bring up the subject of the Crusades as if the West should feel guilt is a testament to the ignorance of their own history if not an outright penchant for dissembling. The West today had and has virtually no territory to give back to Islam that it took by force of arms while all of North Africa, the Middle-East, all of Asia Minor and more remain in the hands of Muslims who came as conquerers if one were to look at this situation with an unbiased eye. The constant mention of Crusaders by Islam is a monument to their hypocrisy.
Like H.G Wells Martians, Islamic Fundamentalists eye the West "keenly and closely" and like those Martians carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.
Japan and Germany in WWII made the mistake of believing the United States amoral and decadent, not realizing at the time that they were merely describing themselves. How mad does a culture have to be to hate in others precisely those things which constitute their own zeitgeist?
If Islam persists in it's mad dream of an undeserved dominance and restitution for imagined slights in this world, the world will eventually strike back with a heavier hand than heretofore seen.
Islamicists make the mistake of confusing moral strength with perceptual strength, many of their religious figures preaching to the West as if there is not plenty of prostitution in every country in the middle-east. The West owns up to such human foibles while Islam pretends they don't exist; and where is the moral strength in a culture that would push Israel into the sea for no other reason than that they are Jews. Is this Islamic enlightenment? It sounds more akin to the Nazi thugs who thought it was a good idea to murder not only their own citizens but those of their neighbors as well.
Any culture who sanctions fooling children into becoming suicide bombers has nothing to offer anyone in the way of preaching. Where in the world is the outrage by the Muslim people? Anyone who thinks it is a good idea to kidnap and behead people on video while decrying simple humiliation of prisoners at Abu Graib is so insane that one can only shake their heads in bemused sorrow as did the first Allied soldiers who liberated concentration camps in WWII, shaking their heads at what such foolishness had wrought. What happened at Abu Graib is a disgrace but where among muslims is there a sense of proportion and balance between Abu Graib, the portrayal of Mohammed in a comic strip and the kidnapping and brutal murders on videotape of non-combatants as well as children used as suicide bombers? Islam cries about Guantanamo Bay and the Geneva Conventions but the lack of military uniforms and distinction between combatants and non-combatants on the part of Islamic terrorists which are the very things the Geneva Conventions specifically addresses makes it hard to enforce.
The reality is that Islamic Fundalmentalists actions show themselves as people who despise the world and themselves. They seem to despise their own incompetence, in everything from societal matters to science and technology, to sports and military matters; everything under the sun. In 2002 not a single University in the middle east was ranked among the world's top 100; no surprise that anti-Western actions and rhetoric within Islam so shamefacedly seems to celebrate hypocrisy and a double standard when it comes to the West. In this sense Islam seems to be totally lacking in self-awareness.
The truth is that Islam is distinguishing itself in the area of unreasoning hatred, indulgent hypocrisy and unabashed bigotry with virtually no dissent as a counterweight. Islam makes no secret of the fact that everyone else in the world is, in their eyes, a second class citizen and that apparently goes double for Jews.
In the media one often hears Muslims using the word justice but as far as I can tell they mean justice to be used only for themselves. Where is the justice that the United States deserves; if muslim lives have such importance within Islam where is some consideration for the thousands of Muslim lives the US saved in the former Yugoslavia which event the world of Islam is so strangely silent on? This silence obviously exists because it interferes with the belief by many within Islam that the West hates Muslims and would like nothing more than to bring Islam to humiliation and harm. The truth is that Muslims the world over have done a better job of humiliating themselves than any other single factor that I can think of. What can one say about a culture that willingly spreads lies that the US blew up the World Trade Center itself and that Jews in New York knew to not show up for work that day? This is the very definition of stupidity, cultural bigotry and ignorance. In this regard, it is difficult to see how the patronising and historically ignorant "comedian" Rosie O'Donnell lives with herself; it is something that is utterly beyond me. There is ignorance and there is willful and hateful ignorance. My feeling is that Muslims think of little else other than Muslims. Everything in the world seems to be seen only in how it relates to Islam. It reminds me of Act V of Spike Lee's so-called documentary about hurricane Katrina. In it, a black man makes a comparison of the path Hurricane Katrina took and the path the slave ships originally followed from Africa as if there was any true comparison other than that which comes from excessively thinking well of oneself and ill of others. My rhetorical question would be this: Do Muslims ever think of anything but Muslims?
Muslims seem to be totally isolated from global realities. One would think that a culture that thinks so handsomely of itself would have contributed a lot to the world in recent years. My question is this: What does Islam bring to the table that makes the world a better place to live? The West without a doubt has a giant load of it's own idiocies to contend with but also plenty of people who tend to balance this out. Look at the enormous amount of energy and money the West brings to help disasters around the world. When has middle eastern oil money ever matched this? The Red Cross is an organization without borders but the Islamic equivalent, the Red Crescent, is no where to be found if victims of disaster are not muslim. When have you ever seen for example, a presence by the Red Crescent during disasters in South America? The Red Crescent helped with the recent typhoon in Myanmar but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Vietnam was a war crime but the West had plenty of people who fought against it and eventually brought it to a halt. Where is the equivalence in Islam? Where are the moderate voices? Global Warming is a looming menace that, if real, the West is largely responsible for but there are many in the West fighting against this. Where is the equivalence in Islam? Where are the protesters in the streets shouting against Islamic Global Terrorism? Sadly, there are virtually none.
There has been an intellectual debate about the conduct of the German people in WWII since the war ended. It begs the general question as to whether the average citizen who does not contribute directly to their nations unjust wars but who stands by and lets it be perpetrated a decent citizen, a decent person? Are they in some measure responsible for war? Do they deserved to be bombed? Are they guilty merely because they didn't speak up and take action against war? Some would and do say, both within America and without that the victims of 9/11 were guilty in this fashion. But of what? There is a huge difference between what Germany perpetrated against the world and what the US has, not withstanding Viet Nam and fantasies about U.S. foreign policy in the middle east. And then there is the very interesting question of this: if the average German citizen did indeed have guilt, when does this guilt end? Does it end when the war ends? Does it end only with that generation? Was 9/11 the result of a mysterious karma or was it a not so mysterious attempt to redress specific wrongs perpetrated by the United States against Islam?
I think that, in reality, when we talk about such guilt that altho there is indeed a moral and ethical side to it that it is however more the type of guilt that is a reflection of reality. By that I mean this: let's say a man breaks into an apt. and is killed by the resident during the robbery. Few people would agree that breaking and entering deserves a death sentence but reality dictates that if the offender had merely stayed home and read a book that they would be alive. In this sense the offender brought the act on themselves and in that same sense they deserve whatever negative outcome came about as a result of their own stupid beginning of a stupid act. Standing guard against the police while your friend commits a burglary in which you end up getting shot is yet a different view of guilt.
In this sense the German people brought about their own destruction, a mingling of karma and reality. At best some German people in WWII stood by and did nothing yet worked in war production factories or provided sons to the army. At worst some German people took and active and enthusiastic part. The question is, did the people who died in 9/11 bring about their own deaths by not opposing the foreign policies of the US? This idea is the core argument of some self-hating Americans and many outside the US. I say self-hating because what is involved is a simple matter of proportion. When one wants to believe their country is a bad country when the historical. contextual and proportional sense of those facts speak against them then plainly these people wish to think of the US as a bad country and it is not a situation, as these types of people plainly believe, where the facts propelled them into such beliefs but the other way around. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn and Rose O'Donnell are examples of Americans who stand on podiums and take the most ignorant positions on the "true" nature of the United States; they do not have the training or temperment for such activities. Imagine politicians standing on a stage and with a smug air of superiority and self-rightousness talking about their views of method acting, film editing or how to properly write a screen play; they would have absolutely no credibility.
Some people seem all too willing to compare President Bush to Hitler for example. I am not a Bush supporter but imbuing this man with Hitler like qualities simply reflects an eagerness to believe entirely undeserved evil of the man rather than any true reflection of reality, civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding. If one wants to move to an issue of war crimes as relates to Iraq then the U.S. Congress and Senate had a role to play. Even if the most cynical scenarios about Bush are true, they in no way measure up to the evil of a man like Adolph Hitler or the suicidal maniacs who led Japan in the rape of SE Asia for that matter.
Where were the anti-war protesters in Japan and Germany in WWII? There were not enough to say there were any. And I think this gets to the heart of it when we talk about there being enough; enough good people.
Were the victims of 9/11 haunted by the karma of the ghost of Viet Nam? When is a population absolved of guilt and does such guilt exist in the first place?
Such reasoning is apparently behind so many comments made by those who live outside the US when being asked about 9/11. The answer is invariably, "It was a tragedy but...", the "but" being an unsaid condemnation of the US and it's foreign policies, the "chickens coming home to roost" as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Ward Churchill put it.
Such "reasoning" however points to not only an ignorance of history but of an inability to reason out history in terms of proportion. These viewpoints simply reflect an eagar willingness to find the US guilty of things in a way that has simply never happened in proportion to the misery other countries have inflicted upon this world. And that is the key on how to think of such things because no country with great military power has ever been innocent but it is a matter of proportion. No country as large and as ambitious as the US has been is going to an innocent, but there is an element of proportion to crimes that countries visit upon this world and of their subsequent guilt. Everything is relative and while it is true that one cannot excuse a crime by saying it wasn't as bad as a neighbor's one also cannot overlook the push and pull of forces good and bad in an entity as complex as a nation. Many people have fought all along against the excessess of the U.S. while in middle eastern countries there are few if any such fighters in a republican sense and this is the crux of the story. If the population willingly or complacently lets the crimes of their own nations occur then they are in a sense asking to punished by reality. This is why it is so important that citizens stand up and rein in the excesses of over zealous and immoral governments. The United States own citizens eventually put an end to an immoral Vietnam War. However, this could not have been accomplished had not the United States political institutions had a core of morality to begin with. In contrast, dictatorships in the middle east have yet to even attain the level of the Magna Carta. Such governments have proven to have citizens with neither the means nor the courage to control their own governments. This is a question of the basic goodness and sense of values of a culture and the ability to see it. People, cultures and nations will always commit crimes, but it is a question of the basic morality present at the heart of these entities. For all the excesses and questionable foreign policies of the US including the crime of Viet Nam, the American people have visited great good upon this world. Wherever you see disaster relief to help a country you will see Americans at the heart of it. So, once again I ask, what does Islam bring to the table? What is their involvement in "Doctors Without Borders", what are they doing to help diminishing environmental habitats throughout the world? From a distance, it seems that Islam is turned in upon itself.
I will put it in an even simpler way because this essay tries to address many extremely complex issues, many of which may simply have no answer. In my mind at least the West is trying, Islam is not. The west has experimented with democrocies, the enlightenment, and many, many movements that uplift humanity too numerous to even begin to mention and continues to do so. Islam, which so desparately wishes respect in this world does nothing to benefit it's neighbors or the world in general.
When it comes to great movements in human history in the last thousand years that have sought to improve the lot of man the annals are silent when it comes to Islam. Simply put, muslims demand respect but do nothing to engender it when it comes to the world scene.
Moral outrage apparently exists if American troops invited to Saudi Arabia are thought by bin Laden to have defiled the holy land. Meanwhile hundreds of Thai and Indonesian women are prostituted to Middle Eastern countries in virtual servitude. Such selectively morality speaks volumes about Osama bin Laden's true motivations which are simply those of a psychotic killer with delusions of grandeur; a Hitler but without, thank Allah, a true army. A moral leader he is not.
If you want to know more about the moral nature of Saudi society look into what a "Summer Marriage" is in the middle-east. It is an act whereby traveling Saudis marry a woman they do not know for the duration of a trip outside of Saudi Arabia and said woman are paid a handsome fee. They do not see each other again after the trip. Very pious. A culture that produces men who can skirt holiness in such a manner and feel good about it is beyond help when it comes to perception.
In Afghanistan, hundreds of opium farmers unashamedly produce heroin destined for the West while praying in the direction of Mecca 5 times a day. They know it is Haaram, forbidden by Islam.
You see in this essay, many reasons why Islam cannot compete with the West in virtually anything. Voices within Islam love to portray the West as decadent yet it is Islam that is obsolete, tottering and crumbling and which has long ceased to have any meaningful relevance in world affairs. While it is true that moral discipline has been on the decline in the West the wholesale collapse of anything resembling intellectual discipline within Islam on both a philosophical and material way is devastating.
Most Islamic culture within the middle east seem headed for spectacular failures in the long run, both economically and socially because hypocrisy becomes such an onerous feature of their moribund cultures that they are eventually consumed from within.
Hypocrisy exists in all cultures - it is a part of human nature. However there is a difference between a certain normal level of hypocrisy and living and breathing it to the extent that it comes to define a culture. It is no surprise that Islamic Fundamentalists lie as casually as they breathe.
There must be a balance in a culture, a basic goodness to offset the bad that one will inevitably find within any nation. And it is this balance that allows me to say "not guilty" when it comes to the West and the criticisms of the West by Islam. The bad is always there to find no matter where you go, but it is not only the proportion of goodness in a culture that acts as a presence to inhibit the bad but how pro-active good people are; there are many truly decent people in the middle east who presently seem to be taking no active role in reining in terrorism and anti-Western rhetoric; there simply appears to be no will within Islam to do so and instead, much evidence of indoctrination if not willfulness to portray the West as an enemy. Within the West itself, militant and anti-Western muslims are proving to be the worst type of house guests as they actively seek to bring about the subjugation of the host cultures. Only a refined sense of justice, lack of resolve and political correctness keeps these muslims from being deported wholesale which they surely deserve. Unfortunately, in this regard, Western cultures are bringing a spoon to a knife fight. The strength and level of activity of good people in a given society can be totally hamstrung by naivite' and a misplaced sense of goodwill. In this sense, Western cultures are themselves exacerbating the problem.The simple fact is that these terrorists who plot to kill people in the Western countries that have become their home simply don't have a leg to stand on historically, politically, morally or in any other way that I can think of.
I think it is easy to see that the West is charitable to the rest of the world and the United States heads that list. One needs only take notice of the nearly countless charitable organizations originating in the West and extending their hand to other, less fortunate countries. These organizations have saved the lives and ameliorated the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Rwanda, and from Indonesia to Bangladesh.
Where is the equivalence is the Muslim world? Where have the billions of dollars of oil money gone? The answer is that there is no equivalence. Where was Islamic aid when Hurracaine Karina devasted the Gulf Coast and where was United States aid when a tsunami devasted a great swath of SE Asia?
Terrorism and Islamic Fundamentalism have given this world little peaceful sleep in recent years. The fundamentalist view is that the West will have peace when the middle east has peace. This is a typically childish point of view from a culture that, for all their positioning to engender respect from the rest of the world in so far as Islam being an ancient or mature culture, in reality Islam has yet to gain an adult viewpoint of the world. If the middle east wishes peace then it must will it. Contrary to the view of Islam, it is not within the power of the West to ensure peace in the middle-east. Are they children that they cannot redress these issues themselves? Does Islam in their wildest dreams believe that the West will have no rest until all the ills of Islam are resolved? The ills of Germany and Japan during WWII were solved but not in the manner they ever imagined and Islam is steering itself in this direction.
The extremely simple answer to that question cuts through a great deal of clutter when it comes the point of this essay. Many would answer that Islamic countries are far too poor to help other countries. That is entirely not the point. The governments of Islamic countries spend millions of dollars on their military and in madrasses throughout the world and so the money does exist. What does not exist is the will that would help during a catastrophe in the West. The simple truth is that this basic human desire to help others does not exist in Islam when it is compared to the West and they are orders of magnitude apart when it comes to this issue. It is not a question of money but of the level of desire to help.
Islam needs to point fingers at itself. Even if the ills Islam says the West has visited upon this world were true at least there is a balance of good that also pours itself out into the world. There is no goodness that pours out of Islam into the rest of the non-Islamic world and in fact one good make a pretty cogent argument for the exact opposite being true.
To me these distinctly muslim terrorists are like vicious children but with the adult ability to inflict harm. The only people who think these fundamentalists have sophisticated view points or moral standing are other fundamentalists.