Originally posted by Edbert1
I'll accept that the US is an agressor nation, but we are only agressive towards those nations that support international terorist organizations. Stop funding/arming/training/exporting terrorists and all we want to do to you is sell Levis and Coca Cola to you, so that we can buy Sony and Toyota products from the Japanese or happymeal toys from the Chinese.
It's not quite that simple. You're thinking it simply from your point of view, with your cultural background and your way of thinking. The western way of thinking. To them we're nothing but aggressors with empty promises. Whether the terrorist, or whatever people likes to call them, right or wrong, it doesn't matter to the people, because they are part of the people down there in the middle east. There's a much bigger threat against them all - the west - which they see as a threat or an aggressor.
What has the west brought to the people in the middle east; Wealth? Jobs? Pleasure? Luxury?
The west has brought them nothing of those. Instead, on the daily news they're every day hearing about people having it bad in several different places in the middle east and all of those have one common factor: The western influence.
To them it's similar situation as the communism was for the west. It has little to do with what the west really wants, when the people down there hears nothing but bad whenever it's about the west and the middle east. We can tell them all we want about the human rights and the benefits of democracy, but we haven't done any of it, on the contrary. To them our talk of freedom etc. is same as their promises of peace etc. to us - empty words. People reacts to acts, not to words of promises one after another.
People react to these acts. Bad acts cause bad things and vice-versa. We can criticize their reactions all we wan't, but that doesn't help if we keep doing something that creates the response. Exageration and ignorance most definitely won't help with the issue. We're not going to get rid of them, so why are we trying to make our situation even worse? Let them be the fools instead. Eventually the people down there will question the support for their terrorists. That just doesn't happen if we don't question our ignorance on the results of our actions first.
