Why do they hate us?
----------
Why did 19 terrorists choose to give their lives to murder
Americans? The reasons include the treatment of the Palestinians,
U.S. support of Israel, sanctions against Iraq, U.S. troops in
Saudi Arabia and the repressive and corrupt nature of U.S.-backed
Gulf governments. (09/27/01)

from - http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0927/p1s1-wogi.html

'Why do they hate us?'

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

"Why do they hate us?" asked President Bush in his speech to Congress last
Thursday night. It is a question that has ached in America's heart for the
past two weeks. Why did those 19 men choose to wreck the icons of US
military and economic power?

Most Arabs and Muslims knew the answer, even before they considered who was
responsible. Retired Pakistani Air Commodore Sajad Haider - a friend of the
US - understood why. Radical Egyptian-born cleric and US enemy Abu Hamza
al-Masri understood. And Jimmy Nur Zamzamy, a devout Muslim and advertising
executive in Indonesia, understood.

They all understood that this assault was more precisely targeted than an
attack on "civilization." First and foremost, it was an attack on America.

In the United States, military planners are deciding how to exact
retribution. To many people in the Middle East and beyond, where US policy
has bred widespread anti-Americanism, the carnage of Sept. 11 was
retribution.

And voices across the Muslim world are warning that if America doesn't wage
its war on terrorism in a way that the Muslim world considers just, America
risks creating even greater animosity.

Mr. Haider is a hero of Pakistan's 1965 war against India, and a sworn
friend of America. But he and his neighbors in one of Islamabad's toniest
districts are clear about why their warm feelings toward the US are not
widely shared in Pakistan.

In his dim office in a north London mosque, Abu Hamza al-Masri sympathizes
with the goals of Osama bin Laden, fingered by US officials as the prime
suspect behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Abu Hamza has himself directed
terrorist operations abroad, according to the British police, although for
lack of evidence, they have never brought him to trial.

Mr. Zamzamy, a 30-something advertising executive in Jakarta, knew what was
behind the attack, too. Trying to give his ads some zip and still stay
within the bounds of his Muslim faith, he is keenly aware of the tensions
between Islam and American-style global capitalism.

The 19 men - who US officials say hijacked four American passenger jets and
flew them on suicide missions that left more than 7,000 people dead or
missing - were all from the Middle East. Most of the hijackers have been
identified as Muslims.

The vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East were as shocked and
horrified as any American by what they saw happening on their TV screens.
And they are frightened of being lumped together in the popular American
imagination with the perpetrators of the attack.

But from Jakarta to Cairo, Muslims and Arabs say that on reflection, they
are not surprised by it. And they do not share Mr. Bush's view that the
perpetrators did what they did because "they hate our freedoms."

Rather, they say, a mood of resentment toward America and its behavior
around the world has become so commonplace in their countries that it was
bound to breed hostility, and even hatred.

And the buttons that Mr. bin Laden pushes in his statements and interviews -
the injustice done to the Palestinians, the cruelty of continued sanctions
against Iraq, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive and
corrupt nature of US-backed Gulf governments - win a good deal of popular
sympathy.

The resentment of the US has spread through societies demoralized by their
recent history. In few of the world's 50 or so Muslim countries have
governments offered their citizens either prosperity or democracy. Arab
nations have lost three wars against their arch-foe - and America's closest
ally - Israel. A sense of failure and injustice is rising in the throats of
millions.

Three weeks ago, a leading Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, published a poem on
its front page. A long lament about the plight of the Arabs, addressed to a
dead Syrian poet, it ended:

"Children are dying, but no one makes a move.

Houses are demolished, but no one makes a move.

Holy places are desecrated, but no one makes a move....

I am fed up with life in the world of mortals.

Find me a hole near you. For a life of dignity is in those holes."

It sounds as if it could have been written by a desperate and hopeless man,
driven by frustration to seek death, perhaps martyrdom. A young Palestinian
refugee planning a suicide bomb attack, maybe. In fact, it was written by
the Saudi Arabian ambassador to London, a member of one of the wealthiest
and most influential families in the kingdom that is Washington's closest
Arab ally.

Against the background of that humiliated mood, America's unchallenged
military, economic, and cultural might be seen as an affront even if its
policies in the Middle East were neutral. And nobody voices that view.

From one end of the region to the other, the perception is that Israel can
get away with murder - literally - and that Washington will turn a blind
eye. Clearly, the US and Israel have compelling reasons for their actions.
But little that US diplomats have done in recent years to broker a peace
deal between Israel and the Palestinians has persuaded Arabs that the US is
a fair-minded and equitable judge of Middle Eastern affairs.

Over the past year, Arab TV stations have broadcast countless pictures of
Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian youths, Israeli tanks plowing into
Palestinian homes, Israeli helicopters rocketing Palestinian streets. And
they know that the US sends more than $3 billion a year in military and
economic aid to Israel.

"You see this every day, and what do you feel?" asks Rafiq Hariri, the
portly prime minister of Lebanon, who is not an excitable man. "It hurts me
a lot. But for hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, it drives them
crazy. They feel humiliated."

Resentment rises, a radical is born
Ask Sheikh Abdul Majeed Atta why Palestinians may not like the United
States, and he does not immediately answer. Instead, he pads barefoot across
the red swirls of his living room carpet and reaches for three framed
photographs on the floor beside a couch.

The black-and-white prints show dusty, rock-strewn hills dotted with tiny
tents and cinderblock houses: the early days of Duheisheh refugee camp,
south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. It was where Mr. Atta was born, and
where his family has lived for more than half a century.

Atta's family village was destroyed in the struggle between Palestinian
Arabs and Jews after Britain divided Palestine between them in 1948. For 10
years his family of 13 lived in a tent. The year Atta was born, the United
Nations gave them a one-room house.

It doesn't matter to Atta that the United States was not directly involved
in "the catastrophe," as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948.
Washington averted its eyes when it could have helped, he says, and since
then has been firmly on Israel's side.

Heavyset, solid, with a neatly trimmed full beard, Atta is the preacher at a
nearby mosque. He looks the part of the community leader, always
meticulously turned out in crisp shirts and pressed trousers, gold-rimmed
reading glasses tucked into a pocket.

In the past year of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Atta has joined Hamas,
the radical group responsible for recently sending most of the suicide
bombers into Israeli towns. Frustration at watching the rising Palestinian
death toll at the hands of the Israeli army played a large part in his
decision, he says.

His resentment at Israel, though, dates back to his infancy, and the stories
he heard of his village, Ras Abu Amar, which he never knew. That village is
still alive for him, just as millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, and throughout the Middle East cherish photos, house keys, and
deeds to homes that no longer exist or which have housed Israelis for
generations.

Today he lives in his own house in Duheisheh, a sprawling tangle of densely
packed concrete buildings that crowd snaking, narrow alleys. But he still
dreams of the home he never knew, and recalls who took it from him, and
remembers who they rely on for their strength.

What happened on Sept. 11 "was an awful thing, a tragedy, and since we live
a continuous tragedy, we felt like this touched us," he adds. "But when we
see something like this in Israel or the US, we feel a contradiction. We see
it's a tragedy, but we remember that these are the people behind our
tragedy."

"Even small children know that Israel is nothing without America," says
Atta. "And here America means F-16, M-16, Apache helicopters, the tools
Israelis use to kill us and destroy our homes."

Superpower swagger
Such weapons are very much the visible face of American policy in the Middle
East, where military might has held the balance of power for 50 years.
Thousands of US soldiers stationed in the Gulf, and billions of US dollars
each year in military aid to Israel, Egypt, and other allies, have shored up
Washington's interests in the strategically crucial, oil-rich region.

That military presence and power looks like swagger to some in the Muslim
world, even far from the flashpoints. "Now America is ready with its
airplanes to bomb this poor nation [Afghanistan], and most people in
Indonesia don't like arrogance," says Imam Budi Prasodjo, an Indonesian
sociologist and talk-show host.

"You are a superpower, you are a military superpower, and you can do
whatever you want. People don't like that, and this is dangerous," he adds.

"America should spread its culture, rather than weapons or tanks," adds
Mohammed el-Sayed Said, deputy director of Cairo's influential Al Ahram
think tank. "They need to act like any respectable commander or leader of an
army. They can't just project an image of contempt for those they wish to
lead."

Ten years ago, at the head of a broad coalition of Western and Arab
countries, the United States used its superpower status to kick the Iraqi
army out of Kuwait. Since then, however, Washington has found itself alone -
save for loyal ally Britain - in its determination to keep bombing Iraq, and
to keep imposing strict economic sanctions that the United Nations says are
partly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children.

Those deaths, and those bombs (which US and British planes drop regularly,
but without fanfare), are felt keenly among fellow Arabs. And Saniya
Ghussein knows all about bombs.

A daughter dies, and parents wait for US apology
In the middle of the night of April 16, 1986, the deafening sound of
anti-aircraft guns woke Saniya Ghussein with a sudden start. "My God," she
thought, "there's a war being fought above my house."

She slipped out of bed and ran into the bedroom where her husband Bassem and
their 7-year-old daughter Kinda had fallen asleep earlier in the evening.
"Bassem, the Americans are here," she said urgently. "It looks like they're
going to hit us."

She checked on her other daughter, Raafat. She had been suffering from her
annual bout of hay fever, and the 18-year-old art student was in the
television room next to the humidifier so she could breathe easier.

Raafat was still sleeping, completely oblivious of all the commotion going
on around her, due to the medication she had taken earlier. There was little
Saniya felt she could do. She climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets
tight around her.

Bassem lay awake on the bed, listening to the appalling noise in the night
sky above.

A Palestinian-born Lebanese national, Bassem had worked in Libya as an
engineer for Occidental, the American oil giant, for 20 years, helping
exploit the country's massive oil reserves. He and his family lived in the
upmarket Ben Ashour neighborhood of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, on the
ground floor of a two-story apartment block.

Bassem never heard the explosion. Instead, he watched in astonishment as the
window frame suddenly flew into the room, and the roof collapsed on top of
him and his daughter.

Kinda was screaming in the darkness near him. Bassem tried to move, but was
pinned by the rubble. He groped in the blackness for Kinda. "Don't worry,"
he said, squeezing his daughter's hand. "Daddy's here, don't cry, it will be
okay."

The blast had knocked Saniya unconscious. She woke to hear Bassem calling
from the next room and Kinda screaming. She stumbled in the darkness,
barefoot across the rubble and glass shards, choking on the fumes from the
missile blast, as she called her daughter's name "Raafat! Raafat!" for
several minutes. But there was no response, and Saniya knew with a terrible
certainty that her daughter was dead.

"Bassem," she cried. "Raafat has gone."

Pinned beneath the rubble, Bassem heard his wife's words, and he felt a deep
sense of anger and resentment well up inside him. His life and that of his
family had been shattered, and nothing would ever be the same again.

It took them eight hours to dig Raafat out from under the ruins of the
house. "Our pain and agony, which I cannot describe, started at that
moment," Saniya says.

Raafat was one of an estimated 55 victims of an air raid mounted by US
warplanes against a series of targets in Tripoli and another Libyan city,
Benghazi.

The attacks were in retaliation for the bombing of a disco in Berlin,
Germany, 10 days earlier in which 200 people were injured, 63 of them US
soldiers; one soldier and one civilian were killed. The Reagan
administration blamed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Bassem and Saniya Ghussein are not natural anti-Americans. Bassem studied in
the US before going to work for Esso and then Occidental. He sent Raafat to
an American Catholic school, and on family trips to the US, Saniya would
take Raafat to Disney World in Florida. "We did all the typical American
things," she says.

But since that terrible night 16 years ago, neither Bassem nor Saniya have
stepped foot in America. They returned to Beirut in 1994 when Bassem
retired.

In 1989, the Libyan government enlisted the help of Ramsey Clark, an
attorney general during the Carter administration, to file a lawsuit against
President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for the
civilian deaths during the air raids. "When Clark came to collect our
documents and evidence, I asked him if he thought we had a case," Bassem
recalls. "He said 'Oh, definitely. This was murder.' "

But US district court judge Thomas Penfield Jackson disagreed. He dismissed
the suit, and fined Clark for presenting a "frivolous" case that "offered no
hope whatsoever of success."

Twelve years later, the court's decision still rankles with Bassem. "I will
only return to America when I know someone will listen to me and say: 'yes,
it was our fault your daughter died, and I am sorry.' So long as they think
my daughter's death is 'frivolous,' I won't go back," Bassem says.

The Ghusseins have no sympathy for religious extremism and thoroughly
condemn the Sept. 11 suicide bombings in New York and Washington. Yet they
both maintain that the devastating attack was a result of America's
"arrogant" policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. "We wish the American
people could see what their governments are doing in the rest of the world,"
Saniya says.

A feeling of betrayal among friends
On the other side of Asia, in Pakistan, Air Commodore Haider would
sympathize with the Ghusseins' wish. He has always been a friend of the
United States, and not just because he enjoyed the 10 years he spent in
Washington as his country's military attaché. Like most other members of the
ruling elite in Pakistan, in the armed forces, in business, and in the
political parties, he sees America as a natural ally.

But not a reliable one.

The prevailing mood in Pakistan of anger and suspicion toward the United
States springs from a deeply rooted perception that the US has been a fickle
friend, Haider says, and not just to Pakistan, but to other nations in the
Muslim world.

If there was a moment of betrayal for Haider, it was the 1965 war between
India and Pakistan, largely over the future of Kashmir. As Indian tanks
advanced on the Pakistani metropolis of Lahore, Haider was head of a
squadron of F-86 Sabre jets sent to destroy them. India's Soviet allies
helped with money, arms, and diplomatic support. But at a crucial moment,
Pakistan's ally, the US, refused to send more weapons. As it turned out,
Pakistan was able to defeat the Indian attack on Lahore and elsewhere
without US help. Haider's squadron decimated the column of Indian tanks that
had reached to within six miles of Lahore. But the lesson lingered: America
cannot be trusted.

"There is a feeling of being betrayed, it's a feeling of being let down, and
you can only be let down by somebody you care for," says Haider, out for an
evening stroll in a tony Islamabad neighborhood.

"They said you will be the bulwark of America and of the free world against
Communism. But then they dropped a friend for no good reason."

Today, Haider sees a "convergence of interests" between the United States
and Pakistan in the fight against terrorism. But he says that President Bush
will need to watch his language when he talks about the Muslim world. "When
Bush talked of a Crusade ... it was not a slip of the tongue. It was a
mindset. When they talk of terrorism, the only thing they have in mind is
Islam."

Ultimately, Haider does see a way for America and Muslim nations to become
lasting friends, but only if the US begins to give as much weight to the
interests of Muslim nations as it does to Israel.

"When you deny justice to people, which you have been doing for several
decades in Palestine, and they are intelligent, sensitive people, they are
going to find something to do," warns Haider. "They might take shelter in
Islam, in fatalism, and some will come to despise you."

An Egyptian 'inspired' to join Afghan fighters
Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Muslim cleric who runs a mosque in a
shabby district of north London, has certainly come to despise America.

Abu Hamza says he used to admire the West when he was a young man - so much
so that he dropped out of university in his native Alexandria, Egypt, to
study in Britain. And he clearly had nothing against the British government
when he took a job as a civil engineer at Sandhurst, the British equivalent
of West Point, after he graduated.

But as he immersed himself more and more in religious studies, and came into
contact with more and more Arab mujahideen, who had travelled from the
mountains of Afghanistan to England for medical treatment, he began to
change his outlook.

"When you see how happy they are, how anxious to just have a new limb so
they can run again and fight again, not thinking of retiring, their main
ambition is to get killed in the cause of God ... you see another dimension
in the verses of the Koran," says Abu Hamza.

Inspired by their example, he took his family to Afghanistan in 1990, to
work there as a civil engineer, building roads, tunnels, and "anything I
could do." And he also fought with the mujahideen against Afghan President
Mohammad Najibullah (seen as a Russian stand-in supported by the Soviets),
until he blew both his hands off and lost the sight in his left eye, in a
mine explosion.

What transformed him and his comrades-in-arms from anti-Soviet to
anti-American militants, he says, was the way Washington abandoned them at
the end of the war in Afghanistan, and sought to disarm and disperse them.

"It was when the Americans took the knife out of the Russians and stabbed it
in our back, it's as simple as that," says Abu Hamza. "It was a natural
turn, not a theoretical one.

"In the meantime, they were bombarding Iraq and occupying the [Arabian]
peninsula," he says, referring to the US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia
after the Gulf War, "and then with the witch-hunt against the mujahideen,
all of it came together, that was a full-scale war, it was very clear."

Abu Hamza would rather see Islamic militants fight corrupt or secular Arab
governments before they take on America (indeed, the Yemeni government has
sought his extradition from Britain for plotting to overthrow the government
in Sana). But he is in no doubt that the American government brought the
events of Sept. 11 on its own head.

"The Americans wanted to fight the Russians with Muslim blood, and they
could only justify that by triggering the word 'jihad,' " he argues.
"Unfortunately for everybody except the Muslims, when that button is pushed,
it does not come back that easy. It only keeps going on and on until the
Muslim empire swallows every empire existing."

Can he understand the motivation behind the assault on New York and
Washington? "The motivation is everywhere," he says, with the current US
administration. "When a president stands up before the planet and says an
American comes first, he is only preaching hatred. When a president stands
up and says we don't honor our missile treaty with the Russians, he is only
preaching arrogance. When he refuses to condemn what's happening in
Palestine, he is only preaching tyranny.

"American foreign policy has invited everybody, actually, to try to
humiliate America, and to give it a bloody nose," he adds.

In Jakarta, countering American culture without violence
You wouldn't catch Rizky "Jimmy" Nur Zamzamy justifying violence that way,
though he professes just as deep an attachment to Islam as Abu Hamza.

Mr. Zamzamy, a rangy young Indonesian advertising executive in a pink shirt,
is sitting in a Western-style cafe in Jakarta, his cellphone at the ready,
and his fried chicken growing cold as he explains how he tries to be a good
Muslim by right action, not fighting.

That, he feels, is the best way of countering what he sees as the corrupting
influence of American culture and morals on traditional Indonesian ways of
life in the largest Muslim country in the world.

Until a few years ago, Zamzamy led a regular secular life, hanging out in
bars and dating women. Then he met a Muslim teacher who became his spiritual
guide. Now he follows Islamic teachings and donates most of his $1,300
monthly salary to his "guru" to be spent on building mosques and helping the
poor.

He says he has made sure that none of the money goes to extremist groups
that use violence in the name of Islam, such as the Laskar Jihad group,
locked in bloody battle with Christians in the Maluku region of Indonesia.

Two years ago, in line with his growing religious beliefs, he quit the
advertising agency he had worked for and set up his own company along
Islamic lines: He won't take banks or alcoholic-beverage producers as
clients, for example, and he does no business on Friday, the Muslim holy
day.

But he is relaxed about those who don't share his beliefs: He does not
insist that his wife wear a headscarf, for example, and he is not
uncomfortable sitting alongside the rich young Jakartans in the cafe who are
flirting and drinking. They must make their own choices, he says.

And though he does not like the sexual overtones of American pop culture, he
knows that "you can't hide from American culture." By living his life
according to Islamic precepts, he says, "I am fighting America in my own
way. But I don't agree with violence."

Ambivalence about America
All over the Muslim world, young people like Zamzamy are juggling their
sense of Islamic identity with the trappings of a globalized, secular
society.

In a classroom of Al Khair University, set in a concrete office park in
Islamabad, Nabil Ahmed, a business student, and his classmates are fuming
over their president's betrayal of the Pakistani people by pledging to
support what they fear will turn into a crusade against Muslims.

Ahmed and his friends are well-dressed, middle-class boys, and represent
neither the old-money security of Pakistan's elite nor dirt-poor peasants
who make up the bulk of Pakistan's angry conservative masses. They are the
silent majority of Pakistan, with their feet firmly planted in both the East
and the West. On weekdays, they listen to Whitney Houston and Michael
Bolton, wear Dockers and Van Heusen shirts. On weekends, many switch to
traditional salwar kameez outfits and go with their fathers to the mosque to
pray.

They have much to gain from a Western style of life, and most have plans to
move to the United States for a few years to make some money before
returning home to Pakistan. Yet despite their attraction to the West, they
are wary of it too.

"Most of us here like it both ways, we like American fashion, American
music, American movies, but in the end, we are Muslims," says Ahmed. "The
Holy Prophet said that all Muslims are like one body, and if one part of the
body gets injured, then all parts feel that pain. If one Muslim is injured
by non-Muslims in Afghanistan, it is the duty of all Muslims of the world to
help him."

Like his friends, Ahmed feels that America has double standards toward its
friends and enemies. America attacks Iraq if it invades Kuwait, but allows
Israel to bulldoze Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It
ostracizes a Muslim nation like Sudan for oppressing its Christian minority,
but allows Russia to bomb its Muslim minority into submission in Chechnya.

And while the US supported many "freedom fighter" movements in the past few
decades, including the contra movement in Nicaragua, America labels Pakistan
and Afghanistan as terrorist states because they support militant Muslim
groups fighting in the Indian state of Kashmir and elsewhere.

"There is only one way for America to be a friend of Islam," says Ahmed.
"And that is if they consider our lives to be as precious as their own. "If
Americans are concerned about the 6,500 deaths in the World Trade Center,
let them talk also about the deaths in Kashmir, in Palestine, in Chechnya,
in Bosnia. It is this double standard that creates hatred."

Ahmed's ambivalence about America - his desire to live and work there, his
admiration for its values, but his anger at its behavior around the world -
is broadly shared across the Muslim world and Arab world.

"I think they hate us because of what we do, and it seems to contradict who
we say we are," says Bruce Lawrence, a professor of religion at Duke
University, referring to people in the Middle East. "The major issue that
our policy seems to contradict our own basic values."

That seems clear enough to Muslims who sympathize with the Palestinians, and
who say that Washington should force Israel to abide by United Nations
resolutions to withdraw from the occupied territories. "The Americans say
September 11th was an attack on civilization," says Mr Hariri, the Lebanese
prime minister. "But what does civilized society mean if not a society that
lives according to the law?"

It also seems clear to citizens of monarchical states in the Gulf, where
elections are unknown and women's rights severely restricted. "Since the
Cold War ended, America has talked about promoting democracy," says John
Esposito, head of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at
Georgetown University in Washington. "But we don't do anything about it in
repressive regimes in the Middle East, so you can understand widespread
anti-Americanism there."

At the same time, the state-run media - which is all the media there is
across much of the Middle East - often fan the flames of anti-American and
anti-Israel sentiment because that helps focus citizens' minds on something
other than their own government's shortcomings.

In Sana, the Yemeni capital, where queues of visa-seekers line up daily
outside the US embassy, the ambivalence about America is clear. "When you go
there, you really love the United States," says Murad al-Murayri, a
US-trained physicist. "You are treated like a human being, much better than
in your own country. But when you go back home, you find the US applies
justice and fairness to its own people, but not abroad. In this era of
globalization, that cannot stand."

Nor has the mood that has gripped Washington over the past two weeks done
much to reassure skeptics, says François Burgat, a French social scientist
in Yemen.

"When Bush says 'crusade', or that he wants bin Laden 'dead or alive', that
is a fatwa (religious edict) without any judicial review", he cautions. "It
denies all the principles that America is supposed to be."

A fatwa is something Amirul Haq, a Pakistani shopkeeper whose son died two
years ago in a jihad in Kashmir, understands better than judicial review.
"When I heard that my son died, I was satisfied," he says.

It's a sentiment shared by Azad Khan, too. On a hot Sunday afternoon in
Mardan, Pakistan, Mr. Khan and his family have laid out a feast in a small
guesthouse next to the local mosque. They are celebrating because they have
just heard that Mr. Khan's 20-year-old son, Saeed, has been killed in a gun
battle with Indian troops in the part of Jammu and Kashmir state that is
under Indian control. With his death, Saeed has become another shahid, a
martyr and heroic defender of the Muslims against the enemies of Islam.
According to the Koran, shahideen are not actually dead; they are still
alive, they just can't be seen. And through acts of bravery, a shahid
guarantees that his whole family will go to heaven.

"It is not a thing to be mourned. We are happy," says Khan, sitting down to
a meal of chicken and mutton, rice and bread, along with leaders of the
group with which Saeed had fought. "I told him to take part in jihad [holy
war] because he is the son of a Muslim," Khan says. "And just as we fight in
Kashmir, if we need to fight against the United States in Afghanistan we are
ready, because we are Muslims. It is our duty to fight against any infidels
who are threatening our Muslim brothers."

It's not likely that many Pakistanis, or other Muslims, will actually go to
Afghanistan to fight the Americans - assuming American soldiers land there.
Khan's militant views are not shared by most of his countrymen.

But in a broader sense, and in the longer term, many people in the Middle
East fear that the coming war against terrorism - unless it is waged with
the utmost caution - could unleash new waves of anti-American sentiment.

Jamal al-Adimi, a US-educated Yemeni lawyer, speaks for many when he warns
that "if violence escalates, you bring seeds and water for terrorism. You
kill someone's brother or mother, and you will just get more crazy people."

Trying to root out terrorism without re-plowing the soil in which it grows -
which means rethinking the policies that breed anti-American sentiment - is
unlikely to succeed, say ordinary Middle Easterners and some of their
leaders.

On the practical level, Hariri points out, "launching a war is in the hands
of the Americans, but winning it needs everybody. And that means everybody
should see that he has an interest in joining the coalition" that Washington
is building.

On a higher level, argues Bassam Tibi, a professor of international
relations at Gottingen University in Germany, and an expert on political
Islam, "we need value consensus between the West and Islam on democracy and
human rights to combat Islamic fundamentalism. We can't do it with bombs and
shooting - that will only exacerbate the problem."

Reported by staff writers Scott Baldauf in Islamabad, Pakistan; Cameron W.
Barr in Amman, Jordan; Peter Ford in London; Nicole Gaouette in Jerusalem;
Robert Marquand in Beijing; Scott Peterson in Sana, Yemen; Ilene R. Prusher
in Tokyo; as well as contributors Nicholas Blanford in Beirut, Lebanon;
Sarah Gauch in Cairo; and Simon Montlake in Jakarta, Indonesia.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Copyright © 2001 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.