Fury at the American Raj

By Eric Margolis


The killing of the US ambassador to Libya and angry demonstrations across the Muslim world over a tacky anti-Islamic hate video have produced the usual flood of wrong-headed commentary from our so-called foreign affairs experts and assorted media propagandists.

Across the land comes the cry, "why do they hate us?" That any Americans can in this day and age can still be surprised their nation is hated by many people from Morocco to Indonesia to Nigeria is by far the biggest surprise. We have learned little from 9/11.

Those angry Muslims are not rioting and burning because they hate Christianity, fast food, America’s consumer society, democracy, or feminism, as we are endlessly misinformed by politicians and media.

The fury does not come because Muslims are somehow irrational, primitive, violent beings.

Nor is the hate video, which was actually seen by only a limited number of the world’s one billion Muslims, the real cause of the violence we have been witnessing: it is merely the spark that ignited the combustible haze of anti-Americanism that overlies over much of the Muslim world.

Many Americans believe they are innocent bystanders in the Muslim world, or involved there on an altruistic "mission" to uplift the benighted natives, to selflessly shoulder the heavy burden of policing the unruly globe, or abroad to wage an unending struggle against the dark forces of what we call "terrorism." What they do not at all understand is that the American imperium’s goal is to advance its own strategic, economic and political goals and keep much of the planet under its sway..

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