A Muslim American

An article in VOA News of 2 June 2009, Arab, Muslim Americans Have High Hopes for Obama’s Cairo Speech, by Kane Farabaugh, filed from Dearborn, Michigan, reports that: “2006 was a tough year for Fay Saad of the Arab American National Museum: ‘An Israeli bomb destroyed a family home in Beirut, killing her grandmother and aunt…’ ”

“Our American bombs killed my grandmother. They were American made bombs,” she said. “And if America continues to give our bombs and our ammunition to Israel to continue demolishing Arab countries, it’s just not fair.”

While terrorism, like all crimes, can never be justified, it is this sense of things not being fair, these kinds of grievances, that if not channelled and defused properly can lead to criminal acts of violence. All acts of terrorism — without exception — in Europe (Ireland, Basque separatists, Baader-Meinhof, etc.) and America (Oklahama City, 9/11 — even in its official version, etc.) have been perpretated by persons residing in those countries.

To blame these acts on “violent ideologies” (hint: Islam) is to radically misunderstand the problem, and arrive at dysfunctional “solutions”. Whether out of malice or ignorance, the inability of this simple point to affect the behaviour of the American state has led to greater insecurity for Americans and the rest of world, despite millions of innocents killed by the Americans. And, it would seem, many Americans are well aware of this.

As mentioned in an earlier post: when in June 2004 Lee Hamilton (of the 9/11 Commission) asked, “What motivated them, to do it?” FBI Special Agent, James Fitzgerald, responded: “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem. They identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”

Kean and Hamilton

This testimony did not make it into the Commission’s report. “This was sensitive ground,” Vice Chairman Hamilton and Chairman Kean explain in their book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission [pp. 284-5], and some commissioners worried that “listing US support for Israel as a root cause of Al Qaeda’s opposition for the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.” In August 2006, Hamilton elaborated further: “Foreign policy gets very complicated. When you take certain actions to support a friend, the security of Israel, as we did, it has consequences. No question about it.”