On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 08:07:35AM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: > Foreign nationals do not hate our "freedom." If the US traded with all, > and avoided foreign entanglements, the lifestyle of Americans would be of > little concern to our current enemies. > > So-called terrorists hate not our freedom, but our meddling.
I believe they hate both. They naturally hate our meddling -- bin Laden's three claims from a pre 911 ABC News interview, as I remember them, were: U.S. out of Iraq (blockade), U.S. out of Saudi Arabia (holy lands), U.S. out of Israel (military aid). Whether or not these are things the U.S. should do or not, it's clear by now that a heck of a lot of Muslims agree with those points, and OBL was able to use them to his rhetorical advantage. As for the "hate our freedom" claim, I make that claim because even if we were noninterventionists pacifists, we export our culture via MTV and Hollywood in a way that jibes not at all well with strict Islamic fundamentalism. We would call it free trade; OBL would call that meddling. Reducing overt "meddling" in a military sense would lessen but not eliminate anti-American sentiment that objects to our culture. -Declan
