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The first question you should ask about your enemy is why he is your enemy in the first place.
Joseph Sobran, writing about Sept. 11th just hours after it happened.
In 1973 I went to boarding school fresh from a suburban home in Peekskill, N.Y. Up to that time the only foreigners Id ever met were my familys friends from Portugal and Canada, my best friends parents from Holland, my friends Italian relatives, and a few Japanese and Korean martial arts teachers, but almost none of them count because by the time I met them they were all naturalized citizens and not foreigners anymore. In school Id also met some Puerto Ricans, but they werent foreigners at all because as the song says, Nobody knows in America, Puerto Ricos in America.
The first real foreigners I met were some Middle Eastern students when I was a freshman. They came from a place Id never even heard of before. Just a a little more than a decade earlier, in June of 1961, their country had achieved its independence from the same country wed won our independence fromBritain. We did it with guns. Theirs was peaceful.
Id been invited into a dorm room to participate in a political discussion. The Kuwatis were nice, well-dressed, and congenial. They werent poor, disenfranchised camel drivers. They came from well-to-do families rich from oil revenues. The conversation, when I got there, was why they didnt like Americans. The one who spoke the most made it very clear: he didnt hate Jews, he hated Iraelis; he didnt hate us, but he hated the American government. He and his friends hated us because we were over there and because we were meddling in their affairs.
They said Europeans and Americans had moved in there and taken the best land and had moved the Arabs at gunpoint into camps where they were now refugees. I didnt believe it for a minute. I knew our country would never stand for that. He likened what we had allowed happen to the Palestinians to what the U.S. did to the Indians, which is why I'd been brought into the discussion. They took the Indians land and expected them to do nothing about it. Of course, from the time Europeans first set foot in the New World, there were four centuries of Indian wars. I felt uncomfortable when he pointed this out, but I didnt give in. I continued to argue with them. This was more than 30 years ago.
Over the past five years we kept hearing the question, in reference to 9/11: why? why? why did they do it? The official line is that they did it because they hate our freedoms and our democracy. Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report, refers to ...the so-called root causes of terrorism, alleged to be poverty and despair. This, despite the fact that many of the hijackers came from middle class or wealthy familiesand even Osama bin Laden is himself a multimillionaire.
While were trying to figure out why they did it, is anyone listening to what theyre saying? They keep telling us why again and again, but no matter how many times they say it, we keep trying to guess what their real reasons were.
Heres what they have been saying since at least 1973 when I started boarding school: They did it because we support Israel, because we meddle in their affairs, and because were over there. (It may have been Ken Burns series on the Civil War where I heard this, but a Yankee soldier is reputed to have asked of a Rebel soldier, You dont own any slaves, so why are you fighting? The rebels reply: Because youre down here. Sound familiar?)
Even our so-called friends are trying to tell us why they did it, butwhen they do, we rebuke them. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal tried to give $10 million to New York, but because he indicated that part of the reason the
terrorists attacked us was because of our policies toward the Palestinians and suggested we change them, Mayor Giuliani of New York City turned the gift down saying, I entirely reject that statement. There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people.
Of course, the prince wasnt justifying the act. As a friend, who is willing to help out, he was telling us the reasons the terrorists did it, but for saying something we dont want to hear, we figuratively slapped him in the face.
There is not one politician in this country who is publicly willing to entertain the notion that the act was retribution for our foreign policy (though I wonder what they say privately). In fact, any suggestion the attacks came about as a response to U.S. policy is met with immediate censure that borders on censorship. Its considered unpatriotic to suggest that perhaps the United States government helped bring this on, but the rest of the world knows this is true.
If you dont like what Im saying, let me ask one more question: Why did we bomb the Taliban? Is it because they harbored the terrorists and were after the terroriststhemselves? If you said yes, fine, but thats not the reason according to Moslems around the world who have rioted in protest against the United States, gone to war with each other and, most especially against U.S. troops in Iraq. They have a different story.
Just as we insist on maintaining that September 11th was the result of the terrorists hating freedom and democracy, or because theyre poor and in despaireven as theyre telling us why they did itaccording to Moslem mobs around the world September 11th has nothing to do with our retaliations. Theyre saying we bombed Afghanistan and invaded Iraq because we hate Moslems.
Does that kind of denial sound familiar? It should.
Joseph Sobran, writing about Sept. 11th just hours after it happened.
In 1973 I went to boarding school fresh from a suburban home in Peekskill, N.Y. Up to that time the only foreigners Id ever met were my familys friends from Portugal and Canada, my best friends parents from Holland, my friends Italian relatives, and a few Japanese and Korean martial arts teachers, but almost none of them count because by the time I met them they were all naturalized citizens and not foreigners anymore. In school Id also met some Puerto Ricans, but they werent foreigners at all because as the song says, Nobody knows in America, Puerto Ricos in America.
The first real foreigners I met were some Middle Eastern students when I was a freshman. They came from a place Id never even heard of before. Just a a little more than a decade earlier, in June of 1961, their country had achieved its independence from the same country wed won our independence fromBritain. We did it with guns. Theirs was peaceful.
Id been invited into a dorm room to participate in a political discussion. The Kuwatis were nice, well-dressed, and congenial. They werent poor, disenfranchised camel drivers. They came from well-to-do families rich from oil revenues. The conversation, when I got there, was why they didnt like Americans. The one who spoke the most made it very clear: he didnt hate Jews, he hated Iraelis; he didnt hate us, but he hated the American government. He and his friends hated us because we were over there and because we were meddling in their affairs.
They said Europeans and Americans had moved in there and taken the best land and had moved the Arabs at gunpoint into camps where they were now refugees. I didnt believe it for a minute. I knew our country would never stand for that. He likened what we had allowed happen to the Palestinians to what the U.S. did to the Indians, which is why I'd been brought into the discussion. They took the Indians land and expected them to do nothing about it. Of course, from the time Europeans first set foot in the New World, there were four centuries of Indian wars. I felt uncomfortable when he pointed this out, but I didnt give in. I continued to argue with them. This was more than 30 years ago.
Over the past five years we kept hearing the question, in reference to 9/11: why? why? why did they do it? The official line is that they did it because they hate our freedoms and our democracy. Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report, refers to ...the so-called root causes of terrorism, alleged to be poverty and despair. This, despite the fact that many of the hijackers came from middle class or wealthy familiesand even Osama bin Laden is himself a multimillionaire.
While were trying to figure out why they did it, is anyone listening to what theyre saying? They keep telling us why again and again, but no matter how many times they say it, we keep trying to guess what their real reasons were.
Heres what they have been saying since at least 1973 when I started boarding school: They did it because we support Israel, because we meddle in their affairs, and because were over there. (It may have been Ken Burns series on the Civil War where I heard this, but a Yankee soldier is reputed to have asked of a Rebel soldier, You dont own any slaves, so why are you fighting? The rebels reply: Because youre down here. Sound familiar?)
Even our so-called friends are trying to tell us why they did it, butwhen they do, we rebuke them. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal tried to give $10 million to New York, but because he indicated that part of the reason the
terrorists attacked us was because of our policies toward the Palestinians and suggested we change them, Mayor Giuliani of New York City turned the gift down saying, I entirely reject that statement. There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people.
Of course, the prince wasnt justifying the act. As a friend, who is willing to help out, he was telling us the reasons the terrorists did it, but for saying something we dont want to hear, we figuratively slapped him in the face.
There is not one politician in this country who is publicly willing to entertain the notion that the act was retribution for our foreign policy (though I wonder what they say privately). In fact, any suggestion the attacks came about as a response to U.S. policy is met with immediate censure that borders on censorship. Its considered unpatriotic to suggest that perhaps the United States government helped bring this on, but the rest of the world knows this is true.
If you dont like what Im saying, let me ask one more question: Why did we bomb the Taliban? Is it because they harbored the terrorists and were after the terroriststhemselves? If you said yes, fine, but thats not the reason according to Moslems around the world who have rioted in protest against the United States, gone to war with each other and, most especially against U.S. troops in Iraq. They have a different story.
Just as we insist on maintaining that September 11th was the result of the terrorists hating freedom and democracy, or because theyre poor and in despaireven as theyre telling us why they did itaccording to Moslem mobs around the world September 11th has nothing to do with our retaliations. Theyre saying we bombed Afghanistan and invaded Iraq because we hate Moslems.
Does that kind of denial sound familiar? It should.
