[Dean's World] Dave Price: Do They Really Hate Us For Our Freedoms?

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Do They Really Hate Us For Our Freedoms?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1190312228.shtml


   Victor Hanson examines Al Qaeda's actions and rhetoric, and says the
   answer is [1]yes:

     In 2004, bin Laden objected to our logical conclusion that he
     instead hated the West simply for its freedom. He posed this
     rhetorical question: "Contrary to what Bush says and claims -- that
     we hate freedom -- let him tell us then, 'Why did we not attack
     Sweden?'"
     I think we can now answer that by pointing out that al-Qaida has
     just put out a $100,000 murder bounty on a Swedish cartoonist who
     was a little too free in his caricatures of Islam. Note that Sweden
     has no troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, lets in plenty of Middle
     Eastern Muslims and wants no part of George Bush's "war on terror."
     But then radical Islamists have also threatened Danish cartoonists,
     Dutch filmmakers, German opera producers, and the pope. All have
     nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan or Israel -- but simply do
     things that radical Islam finds blasphemous.
     So aren't these constantly changing gripes of al Qaeda's just
     pretexts for bin Laden's larger hatred of Western-inspired freedom?

   It certainly looks that way.
   At a time when some are dismissing the War on Terror as a
   bumper-sticker and claiming the liberation of Iraq is creating
   terrorism, it's important to remember this effort is another long
   struggle between Western freedoms and the oppression of those who
   would deny them, at the core little different than our earlier
   struggles against fascism, Nazism, and Communism, where success
   eventually led to the liberation of hundreds of millions of our fellow
   humans.

References

   1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/what_does_bin_laden_want.html