This guy may have described it much more closely to the way I feel.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/281/oped/The_deep_roots_of_terrorism+.shtml "The deep roots of terrorism
By H.D.S. Greenway, 10/8/2001
ORE THAN 30 years ago, when the shah of Iran was trying to modernize and Westernize his county by his ''white revolution,'' dissidents would whisper that their shah, through measures such as land reform and education for women, was undermining traditional society and affronting Islam. A few years later, among the Afghan refugees on the northwest frontier of Pakistan, armed men ready to die for their cause would tell you what it was they hated most about the communist government in Kabul. ''The communists came to our village,'' one holy warrior told me. ''They said we had to put our girls in school and that they no longer had to cover their heads!''
Today both the shah's hopes for a modern, Western-oriented Iran and the communist hopes for a modern, socialist Afghanistan lie in the dustbin of history. If there is a common thread to link their failures, it is that they were both wrecked upon the rocks of resistance to change. Things that both communists and capitalists could agree upon - and education for women is only one example - were seen as a threat not only to Islam but to traditional ways of life. Indeed, in many Islamic countries there is no separation of mosque and state. And so today, both countries, although bitter enemies, are theocracies that have turned their backs on the modernization (read Westernization) of the world.
Rapid change and the feelings of being powerless and left behind in an evolving world have driven hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to seek solace in religion, and some to violence in the name of religion. It helps explain what motivated 19 young men to destroy themselves and so many Americans on Sept. 11.
Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University wrote years ago that since the 1920s, ''Muslim cults ... have looked at the defiled world around them - wild cities, shocking cultural trends, foreigners with alien ways, subjugation to the outsiders, a world that seems to be perpetually in crisis, young men and women who have strayed from time-honored ways - and have felt at one time or another the urge to destroy or the urge to withdraw and escape.'' Since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalization, America has emerged as the symbol of everything that has gone wrong for them.
Many Muslims go back to their religious roots because their societies have not given them any answers. Western secularism, Marxism, nationalism have all, in their view, let them down. They look at their own rulers as corrupt, hypocritical sellers of their country to Western (read American) interests. The vast majority are nonviolent and lead constructive lives. Only a very few turn to terror.
Fundamentalism is not restricted to Muslim countries. Hindu fundamentalism is a rising force in India, nibbling away at the secular India of Jawaharlal Nehru, and violence in the name of their gods threatens the stability of more than one Indian state. Israel, too, has seen a rise of Jewish fundamentalism in recent years, disapproving of the mostly secular state that the founding generation of Zionists created. Most relgious Jews are peaceful, but a few fanatics have shown their willingness to resort to violence in God's name. There can be little doubt that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered because he promised, or threatened, depending on your point of view, change.
Some 15 years ago, a Kuwaiti political scientist, Khaldoun al Nagueb, said to me: ''I wonder if, in its nonviolent form, what we are experiencing in the Arab world is not a bit similar to what Jerry Falwell preaches and the rise of militant Protestantism in your own country.'' And today we have Falwell saying that secular sin opened the United States to terrorism.
Even in our own country, the fearful, confused, left-behinds in our society turn to militia movements in their fear of a changing world in which they see themselves as losers. They may not be religious, but they see conspiracies everywhere, and if the secular terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, and the religiously motivated suicide pilots of September have anything in common, it was their need to destroy symbols of American power and authority.
An Egyptian scholar, Saad Ibrihim, once said that the profile of a typical Islamic fundamentalist would be ''young, at least partially educated, a high achiever, lower middle class, from a small rural town, rural background but now lost in a big city. They may graduate from universities but they are often shocked and dazzled by city life. They are not rewarded. They do not get what they perceive to be their fair share. They are repelled by corruption and lasciviousness.''
And who is responsible for their misfortune? Those in power in their individual countries, often. But who has corrupted their leaders? What is the font of everything they half envy and half fear? The United States of America, or so they believe.
As much as we may object to keeping girls out of school, neither this nor being forced to wear beards, nor banning television, for which President Bush scolded the Taliban, is a casus belli. Harboring terrorists is. And now that bombs are falling, we should make it clear that our target is terrorism, not customs and values we do not share. Rapid change can be destabilizing. We should not make the same mistake as the shah and the communists in trying, in Rudyard Kipling's words, to ''hustle the East.''
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 10/8/2001."
