EDITORIAL FOR SEPTEMBER 9-12, 2011
I’m CAVE MANager Paul Lotsof. When many of us were kids we enjoyed watching western movies at theaters or on TV. The nice thing about cowboy movies was the fact that there was no problem distinguishing between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys fought clean while the bad guys would pick up a chair or a crowbar and hit someone in the head with it. The good guys usually had light colored skin while the bad guys often were Indians who had no use for the law which, of course, was written by white people. The bad guys were bad through and through and the good guys never did anything they weren’t supposed to do. Another nice thing about cowboy movies was that you didn’t have to concern yourself with why the bad guys did the things they did. All you had to do is pin a label on them and call them “bad guys”. It was so simple.
This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 massacre. It seems that most Americans look at 9/11 the way we viewed cowboy movies when we were kids. Nobody with an ounce of decency would kill thousands of innocent people, especially Americans. Like marauding Indians violent radicals from the Middle East are totally bad and that’s all there is to it. We had to hunt them down in the name of freedom and all that America stands for. By labeling them terrorists we don’t need to bother trying to figure out why they did what they did. .
Be that as it may, sometimes it can be useful to try to figure out why criminals do the things they do. Often by better understanding them we can gain some insight and better prepare ourselves. Or if we’re really lucky we might be able to remove their motives so that they won’t commit the crimes in the first place.
That brings to mind the question of why terrorist groups have been formed in the Middle East and what they hoped to accomplish by knocking over the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, then-President George W. Bush offered that the attacks were carried out because the perpetrators envied our freedom. Like much of what came from Bush, that claim was rubbish.
When you take a look at the Middle East there are two attributes that stand out. One is oil and the other is religion. The sheiks have no reason to be angry with the United States as we’ve made them filthy rich. That leaves religion. The Middle East was the spawning ground of the Jewish faith, Christianity and the Muslim faith. Today the Middle East is overwhelmingly populated by followers of Mohamed and a large percentage of those people are fundamentalists who have no use for any other religion. They consider the Middle East to be their domain much the same as most Americans think that the western hemisphere should be dominated by Christians and democratic governments. Many Muslims believe that their part of the world is totally inappropriate for a Jewish homeland and they question the notion that because the ancestors of today’s Jews lived in the Middle East two thousand years ago that gives today’s Jews the right to live there. Accordingly, there’s been nearly non-stop warfare since Israel was founded in 1948. Those who attack Israel consider themselves to be freedom fighters. They are well aware of the fact that Israel gets most of its weapons from the United States. They also know that American weapons have been used to kill thousands of Arabs over the years and they deeply resent that.
Though you won’t find this opinion in the mainstream press, my belief is that resentment of Israel was the dominant factor behind the 9/11 attacks. I also believe that the main reason why our government backs Israel one hundred percent is the fact that rich and powerful Zionists in this country demand it, no matter what the cost or the consequences might be. Our politicians rarely challenge the rich and powerful.
So to answer my question of what motivated the 9/11 attacks, my answer would be our total and unconditional support of Israel. As long as we must take the position that Israel is totally right and its adversaries are totally wrong we will have to be constantly looking over our shoulders, making little old ladies take off their shoes at the airport, and hoping that the next plot will be foiled before thousands of additional Americans are killed.
If we must view the problems with Middle Easterners in simple terms of good guys and bad guys, most of us won’t live long enough to see the end to the terrorism threat. There are half a billion Muslims in the Middle East and they aren’t going to dry up and blow away. We might save a lot of lives and huge sums of cash by getting off our high horses and trying to understand Middle Easterners a little better.
I’m CAVE MANager Paul Lotsof and the opinions you’ve just heard are mine and not necessarily anyone else’s. If you’d like a copy of this editorial or you’d like to express your opinions, go to the CAVE web site at CAVE-FM.com. That’s CAVEFM.com