EarlyBird. . .

Are you really writing about "why they hate us" or why YOU hate us? Your list of perceived sins of contemporary American culture seems pretty much the list I would expect from a stereotypical, card-carrying member of the religious right. So maybe the issue lies not with Islam, but with fundamentalism of any sort.

Many of the things you list are awful (kids bringing guns to school, hyper sexualized little girls), but I think that those things don't really have a direct correlation to other things you mention (like pizza hut, rap music and gay pride parades). Also, some of the things you mention could directly help to minimize other things in your list (I know from personal experience from friends who had attended a tiny Christian high school that LACK of sex ed leads to more broken families, unwanted pregnancies and unrecognized STDS than offering condoms in public schools. High school kids have been sexually active for years, that's not really a contemporary issue.) And while I'm annoyed as anyone else by bad attitudes, there's something to be said for teaching our kids to speak their minds, as opposed to encouraging them to be mindless little, authority beholden automatons.

Also, you say that maybe if we, as Americans, were as gung-ho about exporting art, music, beauty and intellect as we were about exporting crass pop culture, we'd be more popular. While I disagree with that whole heartedly, I'd like to talk about narrower definitions for a second. . .I agree a lot of pop culture (American and otherwise. . .I lived in England for several months and had the grand misfortune of witnessing Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody duke it out on Celebrity Big Brother) is utter crap. Girls Gone Wild makes me a bit embarrassed to be a human being, much less an American. But I wonder if you and I would hold the same definitions of "art". To throw an example, did you see American Beauty? It has a high instance of sexualized teenagers, masturbation, homosexuality and pretty shocking violence. But I'd say it's one of the better examples of American art in the last twenty or so years. Or, if that's too cinematic a reference, what about Othello? You have an older man seducing a younger woman, marrying her without her father's permission, an awful lot of raunchy sex talk, bloody sword fights, heavy drinking, and it all ends with a pretty dreadful on-stage strangulation. Does that still fit the definition of Art? It's not really any better than anything you'd see on The Sopranos.

I guess my point is, who gets to decide what is worthy of being produced? The minute you pick a group, it's censorship.

1. the long history of domination/colonization of Muslim parts of the world by Europe and its offshoots

2. the Muslim precept of rule by the faithful, which has yielded such disappointing results in modern times

3. the chronic technological and economic inferiority of Muslim nations compared not just to the West but to Asia, even to the global average

4. the failure of Muslim ideology and culture to develop decentralized (i.e., fragmented) models of power that were largely responsible for the West's development of the concept of tolerance

5. the failure of Muslim (specifically Arab) culture to develop a concept of the individual emphasizing interiority and authenticity over honor and domination of others, which leaves Arab men with few psychological resources when bested in competition or shown to be wrong in argument (this in turn has a lot to do with the subjugation of women in Muslim societies)

6. the historical association of military conquest with the truth of doctrine, as demonstrated in Islam's formative period, so that even today military victory is construed as divine validation

7. the long tradition of scholasticism that kept Muslim intellectual life too ingrown to seek foreign influences

8. a commercial tradition that remained almost exclusively mercantile instead of developing agricultural and industrial branches (which in turn had a lot to do with development of science and technology in the West)

9. the failure of Muslim social and political thought to develop a concept of society as a single entity for which government is responsible; in Islam, society is a collection of entities divided along religio-ethnic lines

10. the crippling idolization of the Q'uran (and the Arabic language) and the gradual substitution of taqlid (emulation) for ijtihad (inquiry) as fixed standards for Muslim intellectual achievement, as opposed to the polyglot tradition of the West and its religious heterogeneity from the late Middle Ages on

I think that you are a progressive insted of a thinker..of course they hate us for the reasons you gave but...what it all boils down to is that these are the reasons today. Suppose for a moment that the US didnot have any connection to any other country....we all just stayed home in our Christian Communities, went to work and didnt bother anyone.....They

would still hate us because we are not Muslim and if it were not that (assuming the world was Muslim) They would hate us because we were not the same sect of Muslim. They would still want to kill us. So, the point is that we can still do good in this world....support Isreal and every other country that needs support (I am not speaking of financial support) but the support one would give to a neigbor having a bad time for what ever reason. Just standing up and stating that "I agree with your position and your right to be...." Makes no difference. They will take your help, your money, your everything and still want you dead as long as there is someone to take your place in the support chain.

Wow. Yes.

You got it. But I wouldn't say hate really. Muslims don't really hate Americans so much as they hate "America". The ideology called Americana which has resulted in so called individual freedoms gone haywire.

But yes....you stated our case eloquently. Problem is, I'm an American. Oops. And in the future there will be more Americans who see the truth of this situation and follow Islam willingly.

As opposed to the majority of those practicing American Surrealism and follow Islam UNWILLINGLY by suffering the consequences of not following it willingly i.e. rampant everything you stated above.

You cannot escape the natural law of Islam any more than a fish can climb a tree. That is the notion of submission in a nutshell.

Salaams

<link>