Three years ago, people in the USA were asking - in all sincerity - "why do they hate us?" If US citizens are still interested in understanding what the world thinks about them, this BBC readers forum on global security is a great place to start (assuming you've read my entire blogful of venemous anti-American propaganda first, of course - LOL).
For some more confronting opinion, read Robert Fisk's reminiscence of a decade reporting for the Independent newspaper in the Middle East:
"These past two weeks, I've been learning a lot about the hatred Iraqis feel towards us. Trowelling back through my reporter's notebooks of the 1990s, I've found page after page of my hand-written evidence of Iraqi anger; fury at the sanctions which killed half a million children, indignation by doctors at our use of depleted uranium shells in the 1991 Gulf War (we used them again last year, but let's take these things one rage at a time) and deep, abiding resentment towards us, the West. One article I wrote for The Independent in 1998 asked why Iraqis do not tear us limb from limb, which is what some Iraqis did to the American mercenaries they killed in Fallujah last April."
Fisk recalls filing his first post-9/11 report from an airplane, then struggling to understand the negative backlash that followed:
"Merely to ask why the murderers of 11 September had done their bloody deeds was to befriend "terrorism". Merely to ask what had been in the minds of the killers was to give them support. Any cop, confronted by any crime, looks for a motive. But confronted by an international crime against humanity, we were not to be allowed to seek the motive. America's relations with the Middle East, especially the nature of its relationship with Israel, was to remain an unspoken and unquestioned subject."
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