Why they hate United States

NEW YORK - Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has condemned the recent attacks on the United States, is one of the few world leaders who has expressed a candid view on the origins of Middle East violence.

The terrorist acts against the US, he argued, are fuelled by the continued oppression of Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza, in Chechnya and in Iraq.

Mahathir, who is himself battling Islamic militants in his backyard, says that hunting terrorism with weapons alone will not solve the problem completely as long as the anger among the oppressed still remains.

On the "60 Minutes" investigative news programme on the CBS television network last week, a Palestinian psychologist tried to explain the mind of the Palestinian suicide bomber.

The Palestinians, who have been humiliated and oppressed by the Israelis for generations, have no tanks, no missiles, no fighter aircraft and no helicopters to fight back, he said. The only weapons they have are rocks, stones and suicide bombers.

On Chechnya, the US has been praised for its criticism of human rights abuses by the Russians.

President George W. Bush, during his campaign trail, said that international financing for Russians should be cut off because of the ruthless crackdown in the breakaway province of Chechnya.

But last week he embraced the Russians unapologetically because of their pledge to support a proposed American-led international coalition against terrorism — and the Chechen issue has now been relegated to the backburner.

As American politicians begin to look for explanations as to why successive US administrations have evoked anger and hatred in the Middle East, they are mostly naive or cowardly to admit that the Palestinian-Israeli issue is one of the primary reasons for the widespread anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

President Bush thought he had an answer when he told Congress: "They hate what they see right here in this chamber. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

But he refused to trace the origins of Middle East terrorism to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — perhaps deliberately.

On the other hand, the very country that professes free speech and multiparty democracy has continued to ensure the political survival of some of the world's most authoritarian governments and hereditary monarchies in the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

One of the rare occasions when an Islamic party won a democratic election was in Algeria in January 1992. But the military took over to prevent a subsequent run-off victory by the Islamic Salvation Front which was planning to set up a Muslim state in Algeria.

The authoritarian take-over drew very little criticisms from the Western world which has tacitly supported successive military-backed governments because Algeria's armed forces have continued to prevent the creation of North Africa's first Islamic state.

The Western fear is that the fall of Algeria into the hands of Islamists may eventually precipitate the collapse of two neighbouring pro-Western states, namely Morocco and Tunisia, both American allies in the region.

The biggest single criticism of the US — despite a secret admiration for American pop culture in most of the Arab world — is that American foreign policy in the Middle East has never been even-handed. A visit to some of the Middle Eastern capitals — Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Kuwait City — provides an interesting revelation.

Until recently, American movies, TV shows and fast food were the rage in some of the big cities.

At present, there are over 40,000 students from the Arab world studying for American degrees in US universities. But still anti-American sentiments are rising in most of the Arab world — even as it watches the daily horrors in the West Bank and Gaza and the bombing of the no-fly zones in Iraq by the US and Britain without Security Council authorisation.

Steve Niva, a Professor of International Politics at Evergreen State College in Washington, points out that while only a fringe element has seized upon violence as their solution, many of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims are understandably aggrieved by double standards.

"When innocent US citizens are killed or harmed, the US government expects expressions of outrage and grief over brutal terrorism. But when US cruise missiles kill and maim innocent Iraqis, Sudanese, Afghanis, and Pakistanis, the US calls it collateral damage," he says.

Lamin Sanneh, a Professor of History and Religion at Yale University, argues that US foreign policy belies the claim that America is the enemy of Islam. The US, after all, did lead the NATO military intervention to help the predominantly Muslim ethnic Albanians against the Serbs in Kosovo in 1999 and it also criticised the Russians for the brutal military campaign in Chechnya.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine argues that the terrorists who attacked the US have set up a devilish trap. If the US retaliates and kills innocent civilians in Afghanistan, there would be even more anger amongst Muslims worldwide precipitating "a clash of civilisations" between the Western and Islamic worlds.