Richardols:
A drunk waving a wad of cash or a boobsy girl with her blouse open down “to here” and a skirt an inch below her panties are provoking trouble even if they don’t carry a dictionary around with them.
This is a faulty analogy. A more apt one might be, I think, if a rape victim took revenge by killing her rapist in cold blood. Would that murder be justified? I would say no, but it might be understandable.
Muslim fundamentalists do not hate us because they “hate freedom” or because they’re evil moustachio-twirling supervillains. They have very specific, very concrete reasons for hating the United States of America. Some of them are good reasons. Groups like Islamic Jihad and Al Queida did not form to attack us. They formed as revolutionary movements against the horrifyingly brutal, corrupt dictators of their own countries – dictators like Saddam Hussein.
We became their enemy because in the Cold War, we supported these brutal dictators. As Winston Churchill once summed up the West’s foreign policy during that period, “If we found out Heaven was Communist, we would ally ourselves with Satan.”
Our government supported these monsters, because we – perhaps rightly – viewed them as a lesser evil than the Soviet Union. However, the locals suffering under the oppression of the dictators in question didn’t really see it that way.
Does that justify acts of terrorism against civilian populations? Of course not. They are murderers, and they must be stopped. But to say that the USA was totally blameless is to show a lack of knowledge about the past actions of our own government. The hatred of the USA in much of the Arab world has some solid reasons behind it. When you make a deal with the devil, it tends to come back and bite you.
