Why do they hate us?

  Last week, Republican front-runner Donald Trump made a most amazing statement when asked about terrorists.

  "Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine."

  It's not beyond comprehension. President Bush explained it to us back in 2001.   "They hate our freedoms." Of course he may as well have said "they hate us because we're pretty and popular." It would have meant the same thing.

In one of his campaign commercials, Senator Rubio flatly asserts that violent extremists target us because we let women drive and girls attend school.

  It appears that what motivates Islamic terrorists is their weird, incomprehensible culture and religion. Their deity, Allah, is some strange six-armed Gawd with a ram's head, and not the very same Gawd that Moses and King Solomon worshipped. At least that is what many Americans seem to believe.  

  It's simply not possible that Islamic terrorists could be motivated by political and economic reasons. It's simply not possible that our ridiculous assumption about the Muslim terrorists are self-serving.

  Trump, Rubio, and Bush are talking to the very same low-information crowd that likes their answers in easy-to-swallow chunks that can fit into 30-second TV commercials, preferably in front of an American flag. They are often driven by imagery and are actively hostile to facts. Unfortunately these people decide elections.

The Hatred is Beyond Comprehension

  It's not like Trump, Republicans, and Americans in general don't know that we've been bombing Iraq for 24 years, and Afghanistan for 14 years. It's not like they are unaware that we've invaded and killed many thousands of brown-skinned people.  

It's that the lives of foreign people don't matter as much as ours do.

  In 1967, Thomas Merton summed up American attitudes in these words.

  “The Asian whose future we are about to decide is either a bad guy or a good guy. If he is a bad guy, he obviously has to be killed. If he is a good guy, he is on our side and he ought to be ready to die for freedom. We will provide an opportunity for him to do so: we will kill him to prevent him falling under the tyranny of a demonic enemy.”

Not much has changed in America since the days of the Vietnam War. We still destroy villages and children in order to save them.  

  For instance, consider how the White House explained why we had to assassinate 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki who was guilty of nothing.

  GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

Most Americans can't even imagine another nation not approving, or at least understanding, America destroying it's infrastructure and killing its children.   Most Iraqis don't want us to bomb them, but when have you ever heard an American media outlet or politician admit that? And if they did, why do Americans never consider their wishes?    This is similar to our drone strikes in Pakistan, where only 5% of Pakistanis approve us bombing their country and an overwhelming majority oppose it, but we continue to do it anyway.  

It may seem inconceivable to Americans, but lots of people in the world resent it when you kill their neighbors, friends, and families.

  As for our political leaders, they are pushing to escalate the violence because no one in those Muslim countries is truly innocent.

Donald Trump has called on killing families of terrorist suspects. As if deliberately targeting innocent women and children is something we should consider.  Ted Cruz has called on “carpet bombing” Syrian cities controlled by IS and see if “sand can glow in the dark.” When moderator Hugh Hewitt asked Ben Carson, “So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilian?” he responded, “You got it. You got it.” I find this statement amazing, not just because it is evil, but because no one seems to find it unusual.

 The supposedly moderate, Jeb Bush thinks that we have been too cautious when it comes to killing innocent people. He wants to “get the lawyers off the backs of the fighting forces.”   Coincidentally, relaxing the rules of engagement is something President Obama is considering right now. Congressional scrutiny has already been eliminated.

  The low-information American probably thinks that we've almost never killed anyone who didn't deserve it, but then those low-information Americans never took to the time to find out if that assumption was true or not.

  Most Americans have probably forgotten that a decade before 9/11, we murdered 408 innocent civilians in a Baghdad bomb shelter.

Not all who died died immediately; black, incinerated hands of some victims remain fused to the concrete ceiling of the shelter.

For some incomprehensible reason there is a memorial for the victims in Baghdad, rather than a big "thank you" to America.

 Iraq was then bombed once every three days on average all through the 90's.   In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked on 60 Minutes, "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied "we think the price is worth it."   It was just half a million Iraqi children. How many American lives does that equal? It's not like those deaths would justify someone looking for revenge.

  In 2005, two al-Qaeda terrorists bombed a Muslim wedding in a Jordan hotel. In response, President George W. Bush said "The bombing should remind all of us that there's an enemy in the world that is willing to kill innocent people, willing to bomb a wedding celebration in order to advance their cause."   The irony of this statement was lost on President Bush, because he had already bombed several Muslim weddings in order to advance his cause. The first of which was in Afghanistan in December 2001. 39 women and children were killed in that strike, but Americans didn't notice.

  Between President Bush and President Obama, we've bombed at least eight Muslim weddings.

  And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.   But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the United States had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline.

Yes, "Bride and boom". Slaughtering women and children is a reason for a funny pun, as long as it isn't Americans. Surely we can squeeze in a hilarious use of “till death do us part”.

  Do you remember the village of Qalaye Niazi? You probably wouldn't because it was wiped from existence by B-52 bombers in 2002, along with over 100 civilians.   Then there is the village of Azizabad.

  The U.S. command carried out a devastating bombing of what turned out to have been a memorial ceremony for Timor Shah. As many as 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed by the bombing.

Funerals seem to be a popular reason to bomb Muslims, but an even more popular reason to bomb Muslims is if they are coming to rescue the victims of the previous bombings.

  A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners.

Then there is the Chenagai drone strike in 2006. It seems  leader of the madrassa, cleric Maulana Liaqat Ullah Hussain, was sheltering al-Qaeda militants.    The drone strike killed the cleric, along with at least 69 children because the religious school was full of children at the time.

 It's simply incomprehensible that anyone would seek revenge for these massacres of children.

It must be their crazy religion that motivates these people. After all, the Sunnis and Shia have been killing each other for 1,400 years... or maybe that's a self-serving myth propagated by people who want war.

The conflict now brewing between certain Sunni and Shia political factions in the Middle East today has little or nothing to do with religious differences and everything to do with modern identity politics. Just as in Rwanda, Western powers and their local allies have sought to exacerbate these false divisions in order to perpetuate conflict and maintain a Middle East which is at once thoroughly divided and incapable of asserting itself.

 If you think this is some sort of complete list of massacres of innocent civilians by our "surgical strikes", then you have the wrong impression. This is just a random sampling.  

For instance, just looking at only drone strikes only in Pakistan, you will find five times that there were at least a double-digit number of civilian casualties.   Someone might be incline to believe that the families and friends of these innocent victims make take offence at these massacres.

  “Peace prize? He’s a killer…Obama,” the man added, “has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late night raid.

 What's more, people might want revenge even when we didn't kill them. They might want revenge when we simply torture them.

  The natural desire for revenge among many in the Muslim world draws heavily on the hideous and perverse humiliation and torture that racist U.S. forces have carried out in that world. A remarkable teleSur English essay by Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine veteran of America’s arch-criminal Iraq invasion and occupation, is titled “I Helped Create ISIS.” By Emanuele’s account of his enlistment in an operation that gives him nightmares more than a decade later:     “I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities staffed by teenagers from Tennessee, New York and Oregon. I never had the misfortune of working in the detention facility, but I remember the stories. I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons.” ...  And when they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes.”    “After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal at the detention facility, hoping some level of freedom awaited them on the outside. Who knows how long they survived. After all, no one cared. We do know of one former U.S. prisoner who survived: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.”    Innocent people were not only routinely rounded-up, tortured and imprisoned, they were also incinerated by the hundreds of thousands, some studies suggest by the millions….Only the Iraqis understand the pure evil that’s been waged on their nation…”   “….The warm and glassy eyes of young Iraqi children perpetually haunt me, as they should. …My nightmares and daily reflections remind me of where ISIS comes from and why, exactly, they hate us. That hate, understandable yet regrettable, will be directed at the West for years and decades to come. How could it be otherwise?”

  The evil that we've inflicted upon the innocent people of this region, an evil that we continue to inflict upon them, and we will continue to inflict upon them, has caused a hate that is extremely easy to understand. In fact, it's easier to understand their hate than it is to understand why we've inflicted so much evil upon them in the first place.

  This in no way justifies the killing of more innocent people. Nothing could justify that. But the puzzlement and confusion of Trump, Rubio, and the majority of Americans as to why they hate us is just self-serving denial. The denial is itself a crime, because it enables this evil to continue.

  If you believe that your enemy has incomprehensible beliefs and motivations, possibly even the inability to think logically and in a reasonable manner, then there is no point in addressing any legitimate grievances. There is no need to seek a negotiated peace. There is no urgency to question our own strategies and the motivations of our leaders, even when the it is obvious that we are losing the war by every metric.

  94% of terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1980 were from non-Muslims.   The primary reason that people join ISIS is because they are "desperate for money and are struggling to find a way to survive".   Virtually every suicide attack in the world over the last 35 years was directed at an occupying military force.   It's politics, not religion, that inspires terrorism.

  Yes, the language of violent jihad may borrow its vocabulary from Islamic theology – it’s a useful marker of shared identity – but root motivation is as it always is: politics. The IRA weren’t Bible-believing Catholics, they were mostly staunch atheists. Catholicism was simply a marker of who counted as “one of us”. And the same is true of Islamic terrorism...   We buy into the radicalisation hypothesis because we want evil to be mysterious and other; something that has nothing to do with us. We want to tell ourselves that we are secular and enlightened and so have no part in all of this bloodshed. It’s what people commonly do with evil – we conceptualise it as being as far away from us as possible. But if Islamic terrorism is really all about politics, then we have to admit that the long history of disastrous western interventions in the Middle East is a part of the cause of the horror that continues to unfold. In other words, we have to face our responsibility.

  If you want to know why they hate us, well, just look at what Osama bin Laden told us more than a decade ago.

  Contrary to what [President George W.] Bush says and claims -- that we hate freedom --let him tell us then, "Why did we not attack Sweden?"...    Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

The authority of the statement is not in question, and 11 years of evidence have proven the statement to be true for the Christian world.  Yet the typical American won't hear this because of the source, and will instead embrace spoon-fed lies from politicians instead out of some twisted sense of patriotic duty.

  It doesn't matter if bin Laden's statement is logical and rational. It doesn't even matter if it is true. It doesn't matter if your own political leaders are proven liars. Patriotism trumps it all.

  It also helps when the news media, which has been complicit in selling the myth of our exceptionalism and goodness, bends over backwards to be political organs of the establishment. US imperial violence does not exist and never has. “Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest,” said journalist Harold Pinter.