Posted on: Sunday, September 16, 2001

The September 11th attack
Many Arabs disagree with U.S. policies

By Raju Chebium
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — A majority of the Islamic world may not hate the United States, but millions of Muslims have serious differences with this country over foreign policy and on religious and economic grounds, analysts say.

With the glaring exception of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the Arab world condemned last week's attacks on New York and Washington linked to terrorist Osama bin Laden.

While the outrage was sincere, critics say this country cannot deny the simmering resentment among many of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims because of:

• America's prominent role in the Persian Gulf War against Hussein.

• The large U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia since the war.

• American economic might and embrace of materialism.

• America's status as the sole superpower, which some say allows it to act arrogantly and unilaterally.

"The perception in the Islamic world is that the United States is hostile to Islam and hostile to Muslims," said Edward Beck, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 1977 to 1980. "We have been, for the last 10 years, bombing Iraq whenever we feel like it (with) no basis in law, no United Nations resolution, no international agreement. We do it because we can."

Arabs also resent the United States for bombing Libya on suspicions of harboring terrorists, taking out a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan mistakenly thinking it was allied with the bin Laden terrorist network, and placing an embargo on Iraq that has caused untold suffering among civilians, Beck said.

Attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were horrible reminders of the resentment — and even hate — in the Arab world, he said.

Bruce Jentleson, a Middle East peace negotiator for the Clinton administration, said radical Muslim factions will hate the United States no matter what, adding critics like Beck are apologists for fanatics.

Extremists oppose the United States for working for peace because they "fundamentally reject the paradigm of peaceful relations and coexistence in the region" between Arab states and Israel, a Jewish state, said Jentleson, an adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and now a professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C..

Bin Laden's hatred for the United States stems more from jealousy and ideology.

He's jealous of America's superpower status and thinks the thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia since the gulf war are contaminating land sacred to Muslims, said Rajan Menon, an international-relations expert at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

After Saudi Arabia expelled him in 1991, bin Laden went to Sudan. Sudan expelled him five years later, and he fled to Afghanistan, now his home base, Menon said.

Bin Laden, a native of Yemen who moved to Saudi Arabia at a young age, fought alongside Afghans who drove out the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. The United States provided training and arms to the Afghans during that war.

The victory over the Soviet Union taught bin Laden that military action by committed Muslims can repel any and all Western influence, said Menon, who visited Afghanistan as part of a U.S.-Soviet delegation and studies terrorism.

With the Soviets out of the Islamic world, bin Laden dedicated himself to ridding Saudi Arabia of Americans, Menon said.

"Placating him is impossible. What he's asking the United States to do is stop being the United States, stop being a world power," Menon said. "This is in some ways an anti-Western, anti-American war being waged by bin Laden based on a very peculiar understanding of Islam."