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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋ u |
This question has been asked repeatedly by anti-Israel Muslim spokesman of all stripes, moderate as well as terrorist, trying to imply that Israel is the cause.
To get to the answer, ask first what do Muslims in most Arab countries know about America that they could hate? The answer should be immediate: what they see on American TV. That's all that most Muslims outside of America know about America. Aside from Muslim media, Israeli TV is also all that most Muslims know about Israel!
"That means that for many Iranians, America is a country full of scantily-clad, slut women of Baywatch and MTV [not to mention Jerry Springer morality, "Dirty Harry" violence, et al.]. First-time visitors to the United States are often shocked by the more spiritual and socially conservative side of America. 'What surprised me the most when I came to the United States was how many churches there were,' said Mohammad Atrianfar, the head of Teheran's town councils and editor of the daily newspaper Hamshahri. 'I certainly didn't know how religious Americans are' " (Elaine Sciolino, "Who Hates the U.S.? Who Loves it?," The New York Times Weekly Review, 2001.09.23, p. 9-10).
Pointing to Tel Aviv's secular-hedonist culture, Muslims justifiably make the identical criticisms of Israel as the moral cesspit of the Middle East.
"Oddly enough, what most inflames anti-American passion among fundamentalist Muslims may be the American government's lack of religious zeal. By separating church and state, the West – and America in particular – has effectively privatized belief, making religion a matter of individual faith. This is an affront to the perceived certainty of fundamentalist Muslims, who are confident that they possess the infallible truth. For them, this truth is not a private revelation but a public imperative, and states, like people, are either Muslim or infidel…" Unlike Jews and Christians, to the Muslims' credit, there is no such thing as a secular Muslim, and there is no comprehension of secularism differentiated from the infidel.
"When he met with students from Saudi Arabia in [1979.11], Ayat'Allah Khomeini… argued that secular states drained Islam of its vitality. Western governments 'have completely separated [Islam] from politics,' he said. 'They have cut off its head and [given] the rest to us.'
"In seeking to reunite Islam with politics, Muslim fundamentalists have embraced globalization as zealously as their capitalist counterparts have, ignoring state boundaries to create a multinational movement. The United States government is discovering this anew as it tracks Usama bin Laden's network… The West [and infinitely more so Israel] needs to overcome its insistence that the nation-state must be secular to be legitimate… That would enable Muslims to engage with the West without endorsing secularism." (Lamin Sanneh, "Faith and the Secular State," The New York Times Weekly Review, 2001.09.23, p. 15).
The extremist Islamic world hates the West for the same reason the former Soviet Union hated the West – their own governmental system that has failed and can never compete in the modern world. Terrorist-Islamic regimes, and extremist Muslims, are irrevocably committed to a system of government based on strict Islamic law, a system fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure. Because of the inherent failure of Islamic government to compete in the modern world, they envy and resent the very success and prosperity that the West represents, success and prosperity that terrorist-Muslims don't have, and can never attain, because of their Islamic governmental system – except, they hope, by resorting to terrorism. Contrary to the Islamic propagandists, Israel is only an excuse and has nothing substantial to do with terrorist-Islam's hatred of the West.
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