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Originally Posted by GenuineRisk
And Rupert, a lot of the angry feuds waged by Moslems today also go back generations-- Osama turned anti-American as a result of how we handled the Soviets and Afghanistan. We trained him, for heaven's sake.
But here's the thing-- your posts really started me mulling over the "They're attacking us because their faith is crazy and they hate our freedom" mentality that is not all that uncommon here in the US (i'm not saying you have that mentality, though you may; I don't know). And I thought, it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that that's a ridiculous position. Most nations with a majority population of Moslems live pretty peacefully, and what in the world is, "hate our freedom?" And here's the thing I started mulling, and I thought of it in part thanks to Cajun's smart observation about people wanting to do what's easy-- if one can convince oneself that we were attacked on 9/11, and before (the USS Cole, etc) because a religion is "crazy" then we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility and be the innocent victim (as a nation-- the people killed on 9/11 were certainly innocent victims themselves). We can retaliate in any we want because hey, they're crazy out there and we didn't do anything wrong. BUT-- if we take away the "crazy" position, we have to ask ourselves why in that case we were attacked, and that starts to open up an uncomfortable can of worms about US foreign policy over the last 50 years in regards to the Middle East and oil. Where maybe we aren't always the stellar perfect good guy we imagine the US to be. Because most of us don't pay much attention to the rest of the world. We have our cheap food, our cheap oil, our prosperity and what the costs of that are to the rest of the world, we don't really know or care. Until we get attacked, and then we stand, amazed. How could anyone want to attack us? We're nice! We're the good guys!
Apologies, Rupert-- I'm sure I've bored you to tears by now.  If you're even still reading at this point. |
I partially agree with you and I partially disagree with you. Ther are times that a country or people may have an issue with us over policy. But other times, I think it has very little to do with policy.
For example, let's take the shoe-bomber. I think his name is Richard Reid. This guy was a simple criminal. He wasn't a Muslim. He wasn't even religious. He was just a criminal who kept getting arresting. He had no grievance against the US.
Anyway, while he was in jail just a few years ago, he converted to Islam. When he got out of jail, he was still bent on being a criminal and breaking the law. He joined a mosque and he ended up leaving because they weren't radical enough. They didn't encorage him to do anything bad. He didn't like that. He wanted a mosque that would encourage him to contiue his criminal behavior. Then he found a mosque that was radical where they encouraged him to be violent and go on jihad. They encouraged him to try to blow up an American plane. So the religion was just an excuse for him to continue his anti-social behavior. He had no grievance against the US. His attempt to try to blow up the plane had nothing to do with US policy. It was just a continuation of his criminal behavior.
In some ways, Bin Laden is a similar story. He may have had a legitimate grievance at one time, but that was against the Soviets. We helped him and the Afghans in their fight against the Soviets. They were victorious. The Soviets ended up leaving Afghanistan.
Do you think Bin Laden was going to retire after that? Of course not. He's a terrorist. He's going to find someone else to go after. So he decided he would go after us. He was mad at us(infidels) for being in Saudi Arabia. He thinks that foreign infidels should not be on the sacred ground of Saudi Arabia. But why should it be up to him? The Saudi government wants us there.
If you are a terrorist, you can always find a justification for attacking people. Just because a terrorist has a justification, it doesn't make it legitimate. Let's say that I don't like Korean people because I don't like them being on the sacred ground of the United States. So I go to South Korean and bomb some building. My justification is that I am mad at their country because I don't like Koreans being in my country(the US). If that happened, would you say that South Korea needs to look at their policy and that they are partly at fault for me bombing them? That is ridiculous.