What are the roots of that Arab and Islamic hatred?
Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war against us gave three reasons as his casus belli.
His first reason for war was the presence of U.S. troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia, sacred home to Mecca and Medina. His second was the U.S. sanctions on Iraq then said to be causing the premature deaths of as many as 500,000 Iraqi children.
Third was U.S. support for Israel, seen in the Arab world as a colonial implant to humiliate them and deny to the Palestinian people their right to a nation of their own.
Lately, new causes of Arab and Muslim hatred of us have arisen.
The first is what devout Muslims regard as our immoral and decadent culture, which they see as a threat to their societies and their young.
The second are the Islam haters and baiters in America and the West who deliberately provoke them with insulting and blasphemous portrayals of the Prophet and their faith.
While the U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia have by now largely been closed, and the United States is largely withdrawn from Iraq and the sanctions there have all been lifted, America is not going to change herself to accommodate their world.
Support of Israel is the declared position of both parties. And, though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly called the crude amateur film "Innocence of Muslims," which caused the latest anti-American rioting, both disgusting and reprehensible, we are not going to repeal the First Amendment, which protects provocateurs and pornographers.
Yet, worldwide, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims for whom their faith is their most priceless possession. They live it. They will die for it. And not a few will kill for it. Others will seize upon real or imagined insults to that faith to excite the crowds to expel us from their world.
And some Americans will accommodate them by using books, films and videos to manifest their contempt of Islam.
So we have here an irreconcilable conflict.
The Islamic word, especially across the Arab region, is undergoing a transformation, a Great Awakening. Muslims from Nigeria to Mali to Ethiopia to Sudan to the Maghreb and Middle and Near East are growing more militant and more hostile toward Christianity and other faiths.
This is from Patrick J. Buchanan, co-founder and editor of The American Conservative writing at the Lew Rockwell.com
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