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Feb. 11 the government warned of impending terrorist attack, and
newspapers published the names and photos of 17 glowering young
Muslims. For the first time we were being told: These particular
young men, out there right now, hate us so much that shortly
they could be involved in murdering large numbers of Americans.
Thus a often-asked question came to the fore with fresh poignancy:
Why do they hate us?
After Sept.
11, some commentators said Islamist fanatics hate America because
we have been kind to Israel. But the theory sputtered when, in videotaped
lectures, Osama bin Laden persistently downplayed the Israeli angle.
Bernard Lewis
has argued that Muslims suffer from shame mixed with resentment
at the way their civilization has fallen to material and cultural
poverty from the long-ago heights of the Islamic and Ottoman empires.
The problem is those 17 faces, of men mostly in their 20s, who one
strongly doubts possess Lewis's sweeping grasp of history over the
past millennium and more. Mention Saladin to these recently bearded
thugs and you would get back the Arabic equivalent of "Huh?"
The key to
understanding why these youths hate us may be their very youth.
There are dynamics at work here that are most readily explainable
in terms of children's interactions with each other and with adults.
First there
is the Parenting Effect. Did you ever hear of a parent who resented
his children? Rarely. Now did you ever hear of a child who resented
— hated! — his parents? It is a paradox that often the
more you give to others, the more they resent you. This is why the
Fifth Commandment demands that we honor our parents, while no commandment
asks that we love our children. The former is against our nature,
so it needs to be commanded.
The world's
parent, America is always mending broken nations, pulling apart
squabbling peoples, giving indulgent allowances (called foreign
aid) even while our children revile us in international forums.
Every time natural disaster strikes the Third World, we're on the
scene immediately in mothering mode. We pay for our generosity as
parents have always done: by enduring the hatred of those we benefit.
Second, there
is the Bully Factor. I know bullies because in grade school I was
one myself. In the momma's boy who would not put up a fight against
me I found something contemptible, inviting me to humiliate him.
Long before
Sept. 11, America was bullied. After the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing; after the 1995 bombing of an American facility in Saudi
Arabia, killing five Americans; after the 1996 bombing of Khobar
Towers, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans;
after the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies, in Kenya and Tanzania,
killing 12 Americans; after the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole,
killing 17 American sailors — after each of these, wrought
by Arab terrorists — we little or nothing in response. Young
Muslims found something contemptible in this, inviting them to humiliate
us.
Third and most
importantly there is the Enemy Advantage. This dynamic is seen among
elementary-school kids, who bond in groups by joining together against
other children. In nice schools, the phenomenon is called "cliques."
In not nice schools, "gangs."
Thus the first
rule for building any social movement is: Create an enemy. Communists
had the bourgeoisie. The Sixties anti-war movement had the Establishment.
The American academic Left has America. The Anti-Defamation League
has its phantom skinheads hiding under the bed of every little old
Jewish lady in Fort Lauderdale.
Long ago, Islam
established world empires by focusing its wrath on the infidel:
Christians. The adults in the Islamic nations, some of whom remember,
have brilliantly deployed the Enemy Advantage to rally their young.
America makes the perfect enemy because this is the most enthusiastically
Christian nation in the world, and because that callow Muslim youth
who never heard of Saladin has certainly heard of the United States.
If we understand
our foes a bit better, we should be in an improved position to defeat
them. This isn't, of course, to say the struggle against fanatic
Islamism is child's play.
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