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The reasons for hate
by
Joel Beinin
Why
do they hate us? several reporters asked me in
the days following the horrifying, criminal attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon. In fact, they the great majority of Arabs and
Muslims do not hate us, the American people. Americans who travel to the
Arab or Muslim world are usually welcomed and treated with great
generosity.
However, many Arabs and
Muslims who would never condone or commit acts of terror such as those
perpetrated on Sept. 11 have become increasingly angered by the foreign
policy of the United States government and its impact on the Middle East.
The criminal and fanatic
fringe of political Islam elements like Osama Ben Laden and Al Qaeda
organisation has emerged from this broader anger, which has been brewing
for many years. Yet because most Americans know so little about the Middle
East, they do not know why our government's policies are so disliked.
The longest standing grievance
is the Arab-Israeli conflict. This has been exacerbated by Israel's
disproportionate use of force in attempting to suppress the Palestinian
uprising over the last year, which has been extensively broadcast on Arab
television.
The sight of American-supplied
F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters bombing civilian targets and carrying
out over 50 extra-judicial assassinations has raised opposition to the
American-Israeli alliance to new levels.
The United States has
effectively supported Israel's 34-year occupation of the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. It provides Israel with nearly $5 billion
in aid every year, nearly one-third of the United States' entire foreign
aid budget.
Our government has vetoed or
threatened to veto dozens of UN Security Council resolutions critical of
Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, its establishment of settlements in
the occupied territories, or its denial of Palestinian human rights. Most
recently, a threatened American veto removed a resolution to establish an
international force to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories
from the Security Council's agenda.
The Reagan administration gave
Israel a green light to invade Lebanon in 1982, an operation resulting in
some 17,500 civilian casualties. As many as 2,000 innocent Palestinians
were slaughtered in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in the wake of
the Israeli invasion.
That massacre was partly
facilitated by the fact that US Marines who had been dispatched to protect
Palestinian civilians in Lebanon left precipitously, leaving the
Palestinians to the mercies of their Lebanese and Israeli enemies.
For over a decade since the
Gulf War, sanctions have been in place against Iraq. They have neither
fully demilitarised Iraq nor caused the collapse of Saddam Hussein's
regime. His power has actually increased while the Iraqi people have
suffered. Over one million civilians, half of them children under five,
have died due to the effects of the sanctions.
In May 1996, Leslie Stall
asked former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes about
this high level of human suffering. Albright responded: We think it's
worth it. Others may beg to differ.
When the American embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998, the Clinton administration accused
Osama Ben Laden of responsibility. In addition to firing cruise missiles
at him in Afghanistan, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan built by
Ben Laden's construction company was destroyed on the grounds that
traces of a chemical involved in the embassy bombings were found there.
The Clinton administration
later quietly admitted that its intelligence on the involvement of the
pharmaceutical plant was mistaken. But when Sudan requested that the
United Nations investigate the incident, the United States blocked the
investigation. How many innocent people died needlessly because this
intelligence error deprived them of medicine? Was it necessary to act so
precipitously? These and other grievances, no matter how legitimate and
sincerely felt, can in no way justify the attack on the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon. Those attacks were crimes against humanity, and their
perpetrators should be captured and brought to justice. There is a
difference between a justification and an explanation.
The grievances mentioned here,
and others, do explain the deep sense of outrage and frustration felt
widely throughout the Arab and Muslim world over the United States'
foreign policy in the Middle East.
Before we embark on a long
campaign against a shadowy enemy, it would be useful to know something
about the historical and social conditions that nurtured the fury of those
who attacked us on Sept. 11.
The writer is a professor of Middle Eastern History in the Stanford History
Department and currently a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley. He contributed this
article to the Jordan Times.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001
Jordan
Times & Joel Beinin
by the same author:
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