"Why Do They Hate Us"

The Second article from todays Washington Post.

Recently, I found myself in Dallas, a place I'd never been before. As a Muslim writer, I felt about going there pretty much the way an American writer might have felt about heading to the tribal areas of Pakistan: nervous, with the distinct suspicion that the locals carried guns and weren't too fond of folks who look like me.

So I was surprised by the extraordinary hospitality I encountered on my trip. And I still remember the politeness with which one elderly gentleman addressed me in a bookshop. He held a copy of my latest novel, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," and examined the face on its cover, comparing it to mine. Then he said, nodding once as if to dip the brim of an imaginary hat: "So tell me, sir. Why do they hate us?"

Once you read the rest of this article you will begin to understand the reasons for much of the hatred towards the United States. Yes part of it is jealousy but the much larger part are policies that destroy life for these people in their home countries while the American public stays in a state of denial due to the complete lack of media coverage available on these topics. We need to know as much about our foreign policies and their consequences as we do about Paris Hilton. Unfortunately we have a long way to go to meet that goal.