After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed, the staff in the former American administration became deeply conservative. Question: why do they hate us? They generalize Muslims without realizing who carried out those terrorist attacks. The world’s generalization is malicious and points the finger at Muslims, holding them all accountable for what happened. This is what caused a wave of Islamophobia around the world. All of it was just a farce to cover up the shameful U.S. role in facilitating the rise of al-Qaida, the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
Why do they hate us? Palestinians and Arabs must address this question to the current and former American administrations. We do not harbor any ill will toward them, because those who hurt them came as a result of their own policies. Before the establishment of Israel, the U.S. did not play a colonial role in the region. Instead, the U.S. supported the demands of the Arab people for their right to self-determination and independence.
Arabs in general, and especially the Palestinians, do not hate the U.S., its people and their lifestyles, or even democracy. It is true that the successive administrations harbored a severe hatred toward the Palestinians and their cause, without realizing that the Americans themselves are the ones to blame. Hatred is represented in the daily official behavior of the U.S., which ignores the simplest of Palestinian rights as human beings. It does this through its blind adoption of the Israeli’s spurious vision for their Jewish ancestral claim in Palestine, and by supporting Israeli aggression, racist policies, and Israeli occupation for the forceful Judaization of the land. American institutions carry out this fraudulent vision that is against the history of Palestine and its people’s struggle, stigmatizing them as terrorists.
We hear the leaders of the U.S., its politicians, and their desperate defense of Israel, who commits massacres against the Palestinians. They support Israel, which practices the ugliest forms of racism and Fascism against the people of Palestine — an Israel whose continuation of lethal practices the U.S. encourages, under the pretense of protecting its security, providing them with the necessary methods to kill and destroy, and protecting it diplomatically from any punishment.
It is therefore our right to not simply ask, but to cry out: why do you hate us?
We listen to the American President Barack Obama, to his vice president, to the secretary of state, to the members of the Congress, and to flocks of presidential candidates. Yet, we do not hear anything except a race to see who supports Israel the most. We hear nothing but obeisance, loyalty, and promises of increases in financial and military aid. We hear only a justification for its monstrous crimes, its racist practices at the holy Muslim and Christian sanctities in Jerusalem, and elsewhere in occupied Palestine.
We ask this current American administration today, tomorrow, and for all time: why do you hate us? We ask why is there all this hatred toward the people of Palestine, their fair cause, and the causes of all other Arabs?
We ask Arabs, do you like this humiliation and underestimation you receive, despite all that you give to the United States in return?
As a citizen of the United States and a democratic Socialist I have a different perspective on the question asked by the oppressed Palestinians and the demonized naturally peaceful Muslims of the Middle East : ” Why do you hate us ? ”
Any competent psychiatrist will observe that people do have a tendency to hate the people they most hurt. There is both a spark of social conscience here and the rational fear of revenge.
The United Nations got it right way back in 1975 when it declared Zionism to be a form of racism. But the ruling ideas in America- as Marx pointed out – are the ideas of its ruling class. A pro-Israel lobby controls the main stream news media here. Now it seems that anti-Zionism is a form of racism.
Democratic socialists have for years supported the Palestinian cause- without descending to the level of vulgar anti-Semitism.
The phony ” war on terrorism ” is just a cover for imperialist interests in the Middle East.
Think of all these old colonialist powers – England, France, Germany, Belgium- not known for their humanitarian subjugation of ” inferior ” races and ethnic groups – eager to combat Islamic terrorism. Willing to bomb Syria day and night- with no regard for faceless collateral damage. No bells will toll in the Notre Dame Cathedral for these slaughtered innocents.
Arrogant imperialism – the ” New Colonialism ” Pope Francis calls it- will keep the world in a hundred years war -unless checked by popular democratic forces.
How false is that old Wilsonian blather about FREEDOM and ” making the world safe for democracy-especially coming from the mouth of billionaire Donald Trump.
And too many once leftist Jewish intellectuals have in the past 50 years have been corrupted by Zionism and besotted by Israel as a sort of exclusive ” Jew Heaven “.
Two outstanding exceptions are the late Professor Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky of MIT. Zinn wrote the popular textbook ” The People’s History of the United States “- scorned by hack scholars and bribed journalists.
Democrat Bernie Sanders would be a lot more worthy of the socialist tradition of Eugene V.Debs if he were more militant in opposing the reckless U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Socialists here shout : ” We are all Palestinians now ! ”
How hypocritical for the muzzled bourgeois press to shout ” Je Suis Charlie Hebdo ! “.
Not much space for the Palestinian point of view in my ” Providence Journal “. Mostly neo-con drivel.
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