Why we hate you? - Assous.M (reading books for 4 year olds .TXT) 📗

American political experts have recommended, that their interventionist policy has triggered more hatred and induced more young Muslims to become suicide bombers.

Muslims may hate Bush for his interventionist and arbitrary policies, but they are not alone in arguing against Bush's policy; many Americans do too.

Muslims should not hate America because Americans are not Bush; and because American Muslims do love their country. What should American Muslims do if Muslims in the rest of the world hate their beloved country?) Source: The Jakarta Post, January 5, 2006

Visit the website at www.thejakartapost.com


Muslims Ask: Why Do They Hate Us?
By Chris Toensing, AlterNet. Posted September 25, 2001.

(In December 1998, I met a waiter in the quiet Egyptian port of Suez. As I sipped tea in his cafe, he pulled up a chair to chat, as Egyptians often do to welcome strangers. Not long into our amiable repartee, he looked me in the eye.
"Now I want to ask you a blunt question," he said. "Why do you Americans hate us?" I raised my eyebrows, so he explained what he meant and, in doing so, provided some insights into why others hate us.
Numerous United Nations resolutions clearly define Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as illegal. Yet Israel receives 40 percent of all US foreign aid, more than $3.5 billion annually in recent years, roughly $500 per Israeli citizen. (The average Egyptian will earn $656 this year.)
Israel uses all of this aid to build new settlements on Palestinian land and to buy US-made warplanes and helicopter gunships. "Why do Americans support Israel when Israel represses Arabs?" the waiter asked.
He went on: Evidence clearly shows that the US-led economic sanctions on Iraq punish Iraqi civilians while hardly touching Saddam Hussein's regime. A UNICEF study in 1999 backed him up, saying that 500,000 children under five would be alive today if sanctions did not exist. Surely Iraqi children are not enemies of international peace and security, the waiter expostulated, even if their ruler is a brutal dictator.
The United States presses for continued sanctions because Hussein is flouting United Nations resolutions, but stands by Israel when it has flouted UN Resolution 242 (which urges Israel to withdraw from land occupied in the 1967 War) for over 30 years. Arabs and Muslims suffer from these and other US policies.
The only logic this young Egyptian could see was that America was pursuing a worldwide war against Islam, in which the victims were overwhelmingly Muslim. America is a democracy, he concluded, so Americans must hate Muslims to endorse this war.
I groaned inwardly. Here, I thought, was a person as woefully misinformed about America as most Americans are about the Middle East. Painstakingly, in my rusty Arabic, I explained that although the United States is a democracy, we Americans do not choose our government's allies, nor do we select its adversaries. We do not vote on the annual foreign aid budget. There are no referenda on the ballot asking whether the United States should send abundant aid to Israel, or whether the United States should pressure the UN Security Council into maintaining sanctions against Iraq, or whether the Fifth Fleet should prowl the Persian Gulf to protect our oil supply.
Americans do have the ability to vote out of office politicians who embrace various foreign policies, but Americans rarely have accurate information about the effect of those policies, in the Middle East or elsewhere. If they knew, I argued, they would speak up in opposition, because Americans have a fundamental sense of fairness. I concurred that it was imperative to debunk Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as wild-eyed, Koran-waving fanatics. These are pernicious ideas that stand in the way of fair judgment.
Our conversation lasted for hours. When we reached a pause, the waiter invited me to dinner at his house. There I met his brother, a devout Muslim. He too asked me why America hates Arabs and Muslims. I spent two more hours talking with him. When I left, he told me warmly how happy he was "to connect with an American on a human level." He and I shook hands like old friends, as we agreed that both Americans and Arab Muslims should strive to puncture the myth that "we" are somehow essentially different from "them."
A civilized human society cannot afford to think in those tribal terms. That type of thinking leads to despair, and thence to wholly unjustifiable disasters such as Americans have just experienced. Most Americans who have lived or travelled in the Arab world can relate similar experiences: Arabs are entirely capable of differentiating between a people and the actions of its government, or the values of a people and the political agenda of a narrow minority of them. What confuses, and, yes, angers them is that we do not seem to return the favor.
Scant days after I returned from Suez to Cairo, President Clinton ordered US fighter-bombers to attack Iraq, ostensibly because Hussein had expelled UN weapons inspectors from his country. The "surgical strikes" of Operation Desert Fox, like previous and subsequent campaigns, maimed and killed defenceless Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, virtually every news outlet in Egypt ran pictures of grinning US seamen painting "Happy Ramadan" on the missiles destined for Baghdad. Those pictures mocked the suffering of Muslims, just as they mocked my attempts at playing cultural ambassador.
To the Arab and Muslim world, Americans project an image of utter indifference to the Iraqi civilian casualties of sanctions and bombing -- people who were also "moms and dads, friends and neighbours," as President Bush said of the Americans we mourn today. During Desert Fox, there was no outrage at the callous black humour of the missile-painters, or the purposeful insult to Islam's holy month. Despite the obvious failure of bombing to achieve our stated objective (ridding Iraq of Hussein), and the harm done to innocents in the process, no mass anti-war movement spilled into our streets to force a change in US policy. Hardly anyone has suggested since that US officials should be held accountable for wilful acts of terror, though terror is surely what Iraqis must feel when bombs rain from the sky.
Only days after Desert Fox, the Iraq story faded from the front pages entirely, and the nation returned to its obsession with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. What could that waiter in Suez have been thinking of my careful distinctions then?
He does not have "links" to Osama bin Laden. He is not a prospective suicide bomber, nor would he defend their indefensible actions. Today I have no doubt that he feels intense sympathy for "us."
After watching unjust US policies continue for years without apology, after hearing of incidents of racist anti-Arab backlash following the execrable crimes of Sept. 11, perhaps he also senses great tragedy in that the hijackers spoke to Americans in a language the US government speaks all too well abroad.)
Source: Chris Toensing is the editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
But do all Arabs and Muslims hate U.S?
Not all Muslims hate America
Deseret News (Salt Lake City) , May 9, 2006 by James Sloan Allen Christian Science Monitor
(We have grown sadly used to hearing that the rest of the world, particularly the Islamic world, hates America. But here is some good news. It comes from hundreds of firsthand reports by participants in exchange programs under the American Councils for International Education. Here are samples from participants in some Islamic countries.
People from these countries who spend time in the United States under exchange programs not only prize the democratic culture they find here; more important, they typically go home bent on instilling the virtues of America in their own nations -- like the teacher who exclaimed: "I was back in Turkmenistan! Back in my home country! I made up my mind to do whatever I could to make my country a better place to live" because "America inspired me and showed me what was possible."
Here are some similar examples of this good news from the predominantly Islamic region of the former Soviet Union, a crucial front in the war of ideas with autocracy and Islamic fundamentalism.
In Azerbaijan, a young woman declares, "My understanding of the meaning of life has totally changed" since she resided in the United States. Surprisingly, she reports that this is partly because after experiencing America's "freedom of speech and belief and the respect for law and government . . . I started to read the Quran and came to my religion and understanding of it only in the U.S., not in my country." At the same time, touched by "how the American people care about and help" others, she vowed to "do my best to have an open and big heart and help those who need it."
Today she is a Muslim with democratic ideals who has thrown herself into the work of securing rights for children.
In Kazakhstan, numerous teachers moved by American freedoms and social equality say they are now endeavoring within their schools and among adults outside to create an "open civil society" and make their homeland "a real democratic country" like America.
In Tatarstan (a Russian republic north of Kazakhstan), a woman struck by America's ethnic tolerance strives to foster this at home by dissuading her countrymen from quarreling over the question: "Should Tatar people support their Muslim brothers or be united with their Russian neighbors?" To achieve this end, she is creating an ambitious community-wide multicultural educational program.
In Uzbekistan, a woman returned from legal studies in the United States and an internship at the United Nations to become an influential law professor and establish innovative courses such as "Constitutional Law" and "Women's Rights under Islam." Another young woman returned to launch a crusade "to improve the status of women," beginning with summer camps for girls to "increase their self- esteem by teaching them their basic rights." Yet another young woman concerned that "terrorism is threatening the peace of the world," is using her American MBA training to instigate "democratic and economic reforms" that will "create a true democratic society and build a bridge of friendship between the USA and Uzbekistan."
In Tajikistan, a young man who says he had "become stronger, active, free and more responsible" in the United States set out "to study everything related to human rights" and to serve that cause. He then joined the Republic Bureau of Human Rights and the Rule of Law, a human rights protection organization, where he organizes legal clinics for his fellow Tajiks, reports on human rights violations in prisons, and helps a U.N. agency monitor Tajik laws for their compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In Kyrgyzstan, a teacher says she discovered in America that "democracy is not just a beautiful word that allows everyone to do whatever one likes" but instead means "freedom, but responsibility." She adopted these three words as her motto and now teaches "what a democratic state is," while planning "a new democratic school" devoted to spreading the principles of democracy throughout "the life of the community and the country." Another Kyrgyz person, who proclaims that "the U.S. won an ally in me" when he was an exchange student here, is acting on his commitment by coordinating a coalition of 55 "NGOs for Democratic Civil Society" and by preparing to run for parliament as a vigorous advocate of American democratic ideals.
Although these examples are few and anecdotal, they represent hundreds of people who bring us the good news from the war of ideas that America can indeed nurture democratic culture in Islamic and other developing countries without firing a shot.
It can do this by inviting to our shores, educating, and otherwise enlightening, ever more of the individuals