What is the cause of hatred in the Islamic world towards the US and the West?

[Saryctos]

How would you know what Osama bin Laden thinks, when there is almost no news about him, and even the CIA and the US Army cannot find him?

 

Imho, this is exactly the problem with the world at the moment (and has always been the problem): We seem to know exactly what the other people think, and what they want, and nobody considers that highly unlikely.

 

These people live on the other side of the world, and have different cultures and languages. Everything we know about them is at best second hand information.

Osama is highly critical of Saudi Arabia, his former homeland. There is no illusion as to their friendly attitude towards the U.S., 'nor to Osama's anger towards this relationship. Properly planned terrorism (coordinated) is all about PR and getting what you want. Osama wants the Saudi government to be held accountable for their buddying up to the west. The "faithful" come from all over the globe, so you can pick and choose the best candidates for accomplishing the most damage, both physically and politically.

 

You also seem to imply that physical distance is somehow relevant towards being able to understand other people. This just isn't true in the modern era. Telephones, the Internet, global news, etc. makes someone thousands of miles away seem just as close as your neighbors (in some cases more so).

 

Now, I do understand the point you're getting at. It is accurate to say that on a general level there is a problem of assumption when discussing foreign cultures and peoples. However, for a high profile character such as Osama, it doesn't hold true that the only information we have available comes from news organization and 2nd hand conversations.

[waitforufo]

What is the cause of hatred in the Islamic world towards the US and the West?

 

The answer to that question is simple. Islamic culture and nations have many problems rooted in their traditions and religion. Fixing those problems would be difficult. Scapegoats are much more convenient.

 

What I don’t understand is why some of us in the west are patsies enough to fall for it.

[lemur]

Two things I've read about Islam come to mind. The first is from a book by an imam complaining about the emphasis on freedom in the west. This confused me theologically, because I see the book of Genesis as explaining how God created humans as free being to choose between good and temptation of evil. So from my perspective, freedom is necessary for people to be able to choose. However, I understand this imam's perspective that freedom is not embraced in the west as an opportunity to self-govern by enlightenment of reason. Instead, people use it as license to get away with malicious actions and escape accountability for those. This is infuriating to someone who wants to see people at least TRYING to respect each other. Christianity, at its most rigorous, preaches forgiveness of ALL sin and harm but I don't know what the Islamic policy on forgiveness is. This actually leads into my second point, which has to do with killing infidels.

 

Whereas Christ supposedly preached that people should forgive their enemies 77 X 7 times (539?), I heard Ayaan Hirschi Ali explain in an interview regarding the death threats again South Park makers why killing is legitimated by the threat-makers. Basically, she said that if the cartoonists would eschew the commandment not to depict Mohammed, they were basically choosing to go to hell and if someone would choose hell then being killed would pale in comparison to the suffering they will endure in hell. Of course, this doesn't make sense to me in terms of the commandment not to kill, but the logic does make sense. In other words, people who kill sinners may not be doing so from a perspective of hate but of mercy, since they recognize the hell that people are going to endure for their sins.

 

Although I have a more worldly perspective on sin and hell (i.e. that hell is a state of life that results from sin prior to death), I understand how someone could view themselves as saving someone from hell by ending their life of sin, provided they believed that such a person was beyond redemption. As I said, this contrasts starkly with Christian forgiveness-ethic in which no sinner is supposed to ever be viewed or treated as beyond redemption. I'm sure some sins must be viewed as redeemable in Islam, but I don't know which or how. From the rumors I've heard, Islam offers only retribution justice (eye for an eye), but that seems like a stereotype made up by Christians to me.

 

The sexual regulations actually make a lot of sense, imo. They at least cause me to think differently about things I take for granted in western culture. Why, for example, should a man wash his hands of a lover after cheating on his wife? Shouldn't he marry her to take responsibility for his sexual exploitation of her? Likewise, if a woman is dishonored by her husband committing adultery, shouldn't at least the man's mistress be at her mercy? You could also say that her husband should be at her mercy, but she needs him in order not to have to seek a new husband. So it makes some sense to me that it is the betrayed spouse's right to take mercy on the adulterer.

 

Likewise, while I don't really think it's fair or nice for women to have to cover up a lot, it does make sense to me that this is something women can do to help men resist temptation. In the west, it's as if women are encouraged to be temptresses in their manner of dress and behavior, which makes them seem like opposers of morality instead of allies. Anyway, I am trying to understand various cultural issues from religious perspectives but I don't know how successful I really am.