“Why do these people hate the United States so much?” my sister asked me by phone on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, a day that no American now living will ever forget. She had spoken that afternoon to a friend in New York whose husband, having recently taken a position with a company located near the top of one of the World Trade Center towers, had called that morning to report that an aircraft had struck the other tower and he was evacuating the building with other co-workers. He never made it home.

Why do these people hate the United States so much?

All of us have heard this question over and over again this week. Some have asked the question in anger. Others have asked the question as if they were genuinely baffled by the massive assault on our country. Still others have sounded like querulous children who have just awakened from a long nap. “How could anyone hate us? We’re Americans. We like everybody. Why can’t everybody just get along?”

Why do these people hate the United States? It’s a natural question. It is also a question whose frequency these last few days should appall us, for it reveals by its very innocence how out of touch we as ordinary citizens are with certain parts of the world in which our country is deeply involved.

Why do these people hate us?

First, they hate us for supporting the tiny country of Israel. For the past 53 years the United States has stood by Israel as her principal ally. We have poured billions of American dollars into Israeli coffers.
We have sent Israel weapons. We have shared information with Israeli intelligence. We have frequently overlooked or explained away Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

These facts are apparent to all who know anything about U.S. foreign policy, yet those who publicly point out the facts risk being labelled anti-Semitic. To inquire as an American into the reasons for our support for Israel, rather than being regarded as a reasonable or patriotic question, is to risk being labelled a Nazi. Palestinians and many other Arabs regard such blind and seemingly coerced allegiance on our part as being directly inimical to their own interests.

A second reason for their animosity toward the United States is that many in the Arab world, particularly in those countries governed by what our media label “Islamic fundamentalists,” genuinely regard the United States as the Great Satan, a corrupter of morals, a sewer spewing filth into the world. Americans do not take kindly to such criticism, if indeed we pay it any attention at all. But there are entire peoples in the Middle East who detest our manner of dress, the television we watch, our literature, our laws and social practices in regard to everything from abortion to pornography. These countries see our way of life as both pagan and barbaric, a real-threat to their culture. They see in the United States a country of unfeeling killers, a country whose previous president ordered a bombing attack on the evening before his impeachment, an attack that left murdered civilians in its wake.

Finally, some Arabs doubtless dislike us because we make no attempt to understand them or their civilization. How many citizens of the United States can explain in even the simplest fashion the history of the Middle East since World War I? How many of us understand the first thing about Islam? In all the years of the Palestinian crisis, how often did our media attempt to present the Palestinians as anything other than street thugs?

Even our news commentators display monumental ignorance. This week they described the terrorists as cowardly suicide bombers, then stated that the Koran, Islam’s holy book, condemns suicide. Can’t people like Peter Jennings or Chris Wallace see that the “suicide bombers” don’t regard themselves as suicides, that this is our term for them? These men regard themselves as warriors in a holy war, a jihad, using their bodies as weapons. To keep referring to them as “cowards” who have committed “senseless acts” is to fool ourselves. These terrorists are dedicated, fanatical, murderous men and women who reason coldly, who view people as abstractions rather than souls, and who willingly die for a cause.

What can we do in the face of such hatred?

First, in regard to the immediate future, we must commit ourselves to a policy of total war on those who planned, directed, supported or in any way knowingly assisted the attacks of Sept. 11. We must crush all those organizations by the legitimate means of warfare, not only to exact retribution, but to ensure that those particular organizations will never again possess the power to commit such audacious and horrific acts. We must wage that war in the full knowledge that we are all on the front lines and that the next direct assault on U.S. citizens may not be by conventional means but by other more heinous weapons of warfare. We must understand from the beginning that the war should be limited to those who declared war on us. We must also understand that losing this war must not be considered a possibility.

Once we have achieved our victory — and it will be achieved — we should then engage in a nationwide dialogue on what exactly our commitment to the world is, especially in the Middle East. In regard to foreign policy, our politicians thus far have followed the whim of fortune, and we have followed our politicians. Now it is time to understand what we are doing and why we are doing it. We need to know why those people in New York died. We need to understand why the Palestinians and other Arab nations hate us. We need to know why we are involved in the Middle East. We need to ask ourselves whether that involvement benefits us as a nation.

The answers to such questions may not always please us, and we will disagree with one another over the direction which our nation has taken since the Second World War, but at least we will comprehend the purpose of our involvement and the reasons for our global commitment.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves what sort of example we are setting for the world. If we are indeed to be the world’s nanny, then we must learn to behave like a nanny rather than a schizophrenic housekeeper who wags a finger at the world with one hand while reaching for the booze with the other. If we insist on a war on drugs in South America, then we must begin cleaning up our own act here. If we are going to barge into places like Somalia or the Balkans, then we need a news media here that will educate us and we need, as citizens, to show a willingness to be educated. If we are going to tell those living in Afganistan or Libya or China that we possess a superior civilization, then we need to change our attitudes toward violence, drugs, easy money, and sexual promiscuity.

We must, in a word, become virtuous again, both as individuals and as a nation. Many of us have sung “God Bless America” several times this week, that song in which we ask God to stand beside America and to guide her. Many of us keep saying that we believe in God. Now is the time to begin acting as if we believed.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville.)

 

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