Why Do they Hate Us?

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AAAintheBeltway

Popular question after 9/11. Looks like we need to examine it again.

I heard Rush yesterday excoriating this guy Michael Scheuer, who was head of the CIA's al qaeda unit at one time. Now he is one of the talking heads often interviewed about terrorism.

He wrote an article in the wake of the Boston bombing basically saying that muslim terrorists attack us because of our interventionist polcies in the middle east and our support for Israel, the Saudi monarchy and the Gulf shiekdoms. See http://non-intervention.com/1104/u-s-leaders-fingerprints-are-on-the-detonators/

He disavows the common expression that "they hate us for our freedoms".

I seldom criticize Rush, but he was dead wrong in this instance and Scheuer was right. I think where Rush went wrong is he interpreted it as somehow excusing the terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Scheuer says repeatedly in his comments that one of our main problems is we start these wars but slink away with our tail between our legs without winning. That only emboldens our enemies. Scheuer does not want to explain them or understand them, he wants to kill them.

I think Scheuer has it partially right, but I believe he minimizes the rage our society produces in these young muslim men. They are often losers who have their noses rubbed in that fact every day. Arabs in particular come from a shame-based culture, and that constant shame is intolerable to them. At the same time, they see women flaunting their freedom and sexuality, which no doubt is deeply offensive to them, particularly since they are getting rejected by the same women. The rage is skillfully stoked by radical clerics or terrorist recruiters, either from al qaeda or the FBI.

The bottom line for me is that we have to accept that our hyper-interventionist foreign policy has consequences. One is that we create large pools of people who would like to see harm come to us. You don't have to take a position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or accept or reject US policies because of it. You can't ignore it however.
 
Excerpt from his comments:


http://non-intervention.com/1104/u-s-leaders-fingerprints-are-on-the-detonators/


4.) U.S. and Western interventionism also is, in may ways, a two-for for Islamist leaders, their groups, and their ability to attract increasing numbers of young man to their banners. For example, we invade Libya and destroy a viciously anti-Islamist regime. Thereby, we assist in the freeing of thousands of Islamist fighters from Libyan prisons, skilled and experienced men who immediately return to the mujahedin; we facilitate the looting of dozens of arsenals — as we did in Egypt and Tunisia — and so we better arm the mujahedin across Africa; and we deliberately destroy a valuable intelligence ally in our war against the Islamists. And all this in the name of a secular democratic movement that surely exists in the deranged-by-feminism brains of Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice but to no considerable extent anywhere in the Arab world.

–5.) Just as damaging to the genuine national security interests of the United States and Western Europe is the combination of relentless interventionism and feckless, effeminate war-making. Whether the war was emphatically a necessity — as in Afghanistan — or a criminally whimsical choice –as in Iraq and Mali — the U.S. and its NATO allies always lose. And they lose not because their Islamist enemies are stronger or better armed — they clearly are not — but because the U.S. and the West will not kill the requisite number of the enemy and their supporters, and destroy enough of the foe’s resources and infrastructures, to make our the Islamists know for certain that the bloody game they started — their religious war against the West — is not worth the candle. As a result, we have suffered truly staggering loses in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we will in Mali as the Islamist insurgency there evolves and expands. However much President Obama and the war-boys McCain and Graham dress up the effectiveness and describe the success of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of the Muslim world — and especially the young male segment of that population — perceives that the much vaunted U.S. military had its ass kicked and is running home chased by Allah’s warriors, just as the Soviets were evicted from Afghanistan in the 1980s. What better recruiting tool could there be than a perceived reality among young Muslims — underpinned by the reality of U.S. withdrawal-without-victory in Iraq and Afghanistan — that the theoretically omni-powerful U.S. military is an organization that is made reliably contemptible because it is deliberately hamstrung by politicians who are more than willing to wail lamentations and cry crocodile tears over U.S. casualties, but are not willing to protect Americans because they cannot face the reality that the one and only thing that counts in war is victory.
 
Muslims fight each other. they are at war with each other, constantly. If there were no USA or Israel = world peace?
 
I did see part of that debate. I think they hate us because of mostly our success and the fact that that see us in the ME. But they would hate us as the successful people we have been and because we behave contrary to what the Koran tells them.

The fact that we have troops in the ME is just an excuse to attack us. If we pulled completely out of the ME and other muslim countries we would still be despised and attacked. The would just say we are weak now for pulling back.

The problem has been oil money and even our money to finance their ideology and terrorist attacks. Take the money away and they would go back to fighting each other from camel back.
 
There is nothing new or unique in Scheuer's assessment of the causes for Arab-U.S. tension. And too, we can agree that the U.S approach to dealing with the terrorist problem is ineffective and irrational. The silly idea that Muslims hate the U.S. "because we are free" or "because we are successful" is pablum for the uneducated masses. It makes no sense whatsoever to any educated person. Scheuer's viewpoint on the question of "cause" is little different from that of any well-educated, well-informed Westerner.

Scheuer goes further to say that the U.S. "has damag[ed] ... the ... security interests of the United States and Western Europe [with a] combination of relentless interventionism and feckless, effeminate war-making." And again he will find no disagreement among the well-informed. This is so widely accepted among Americans, in fact, that it is nearly superfluous to point it out.

But then Scheuer goes somewhat off the deep end as it were, enough so as to make one wonder if the man has perhaps a flawed grasp of history and human nature. He suggests that "[The U.S. and its Western allies are losing their wars against] ... their Islamist enemies... because the U.S. and the West will not kill the requisite number of the enemy and their supporters, and destroy enough of the foe’s resources and infrastructures, to make ... the Islamists know for certain that the bloody game they started — their religious war against the West — is not worth the candle."

Now we have a picture of a man with both a practical grasp of matters and a touch of insanity. Does Scheuer not realize that this is 2013 not 1945. This is the age of the internet-- of world-wide mass communication. The industrialized countries will no longer tolerate one of their own engaging in mass killings of hundreds of thousands by gassing, incineration, and vaporization in thermonuclear holocausts -- including the near total destruction of entire countries. These are actions ascribed to rogue nations -- actions that in the past we engaged in but now smugly place ourselves above..

Does anyone, including Mr. Scheuer, think that the U.S. can defeat by conventional warfare an enemy highly motivated by religious fervor and intermingled among generally supportive populations in a large number of muslin countries -- an enemy that can't even be reliably identified!? Surely this can not be done short of using nuclear weapons with total annihilation of hundreds of thousands of non-terrorists, i.e, total destruction. In that case there would be no essential difference between ourselves and our enemy-- one terrorist fighting another, so to speak. After all, the U.S. could not defeat the highly motivated citizens of Indochina after laying waste to their beautiful countries by exploding more ordinance, more incendiaries, more cluster bombs than in all of World War II. Why should such a similar barbaric assault succeed in triumphing over an enemy spread over much of the world and intermingled among the world's Muslim populations? If Mr. Scheuer accepts the impossibility of defeating such a dispersed enemy by conventional warfare, is he then suggesting that much of the occupied land mass of the Earth be incinerated using nuclear weapons, so that if a terrorist happens to be residing there he may be incinerated too?

Having recognized the cause of the conflict between the Arab and Western worlds, as both Mr. Scheuer and the rest of us have, isn't the way to peacefully resolve that conflict self-evident? I would think so. For once the cause of a problem is known, the solution is also known.
 
In typical American fashion, we're over thinking this. Trying to figure out why someone hates your guts has some merit while you're still in the discussion phase of things. Once it get's physical it becomes a moot point. You can either let them beat your ass, or you can beat theirs. And I don't mean bloody someone's nose beating. I mean sent to the hospital as a cripple for life kind of beatdown, or dead. Man up bitches, this ain't gonna' get any easier.
 
Quote from AAAintheBeltway:


I think Scheuer has it partially right, but I believe he minimizes the rage our society produces in these young muslim men. They are often losers who have their noses rubbed in that fact every day. Arabs in particular come from a shame-based culture, and that constant shame is intolerable to them.
More...

The US has known this for 60 years. Shortly after WW2, a US Govt. study analyzed Arab culture and identified the intense humiliation the average Arab must deal in their pedestrian lives. I will try to find the study, but I know what it's gist was and I know it was produced circa 1946.

Liberals are ruining the planet.
 
Quote from VVV1234:

The US has known this for 60 years. Shortly after WW2, a US Govt. study analyzed Arab culture and identified the intense humiliation the average Arab must deal in their pedestrian lives.

Liberals are ruining the planet.
More...
Well having a culture of fucking camels will tend to do that.

Somehow it doesn't make it obligatory for me to give them a pass on blowing up women and children (because now they can't afford camels) and that making do with goats & donkeys diminishes their sense of manhood.
 
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