Why do Islamic Radicals Want to Kill Americans?

Why do Islamic radicals want to kill innocent Americans? I’m not certain that I know, but I have a novel idea. Let’s listen to what they say.

For example, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef is the guy who helped organize the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the bombing. In January 1998 the New York Times published excerpts from his statement to the court:

Rings a bell for me. But then I’ve been working with revisionist theory for the last twenty years. Revisionism prepares you to view American foreign policy, and terrorism, from a perspective that is not insular in its Americanism. For the last three or four decades revisionist theory has been absorbed with addressing issues about the intentional killing of German and Japanese civilians during World War II, the allegedly unique monstrosity of (particularly) the Germans, and the lying and hypocrisy that has been employed by our cultural elites, including the professorial class, to cover up the real history of that time and to marginalize what they cannot bury.

When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef accuses American of being “butchers,” he refers to the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in mass fire bombings, which was American policy, and the nuclear destruction of the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the New York Times excerpt Yousef does not mention the intentional slaughter of hundreds of thousands of German civilians in mass terror bombings – but then this is the New York Times and the Times does not specialize in viewing Germans of that period as, well – human beings.

When Ramzi Ahmed Yousef argues that Americans are “hypocrites” he refers to the fact that at the very time when he was convicted of the intentional killing of seven or eight civilians at the World Trade Center, the US was enforcing an economic blockade on Iraq that had resulted in the deaths of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi (Arab) children. That is, the American government was pursuing a policy of “collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies ….” Hypocrisy in spades.

“Lying?” Those in the US Government? No need to go into it.

Presently the Bush people, backed by the US Congress, are busy making plans to rid the world of “terrorists” once and for all. They are preparing to “hunt them down,” “smoke” them out of their hiding places, and bring them to justice “dead or alive.” If we ever lay our hands on Osama Bin Laden, for example, and he lives through it, I suppose he will be put on trial and after he is convicted (let’s not kid ourselves here) he will be allowed to make his own statement to the court. What will he say about terrorism? Here are a few lines culled from a long interview he gave to ABC’s John Miller:

In short, Osama will say about what Ramzi Ahmed Yousef said three years ago. He will say that the second – final — attack on the World Trade Center was the result of American foreign policy which, among other things, is a witch’s brew of butchery, lies, and hypocrisy.