Societies must mediate conflicts, which is why you have laws, debates, and elections. If someone decides that one of their freedoms is to shoot you and take everything you own, you might object. Well, most people might, but maybe you wouldn’t. Some freedoms contradict the freedoms of others, and must be negotiated within society. But a gay person’s right to marry has no impact on the marriages of straight people, and our freedoms in the media and the internet have no impact on the freedoms of the people of the Middle East. The effort to limit these, and other similar campaigns, are essentially fascist. They are the attempt to impose control for the sake of control. Do not dignify them as an inevitable result of democracy.

People in the occupied territories are pissed at Israel. Iran is not an occupied territory. Neither is Saudi Arabia. The Muslim extremists aren’t even concerned with the people in the occupied territories, as the casualty list indicates. And say we get rid of the tyrannies they complain about, as Bush did in Iraq? Look at what happened. So what are we supposed to do? We can’t go back in time and undo what’s been done.

You are too willing to take the opinions of a small vocal group in the Middle East, just as they are too willing to assume that we are all Dubya. Most of them just want to get on with their lives. The motivations of terrorists are every bit as twisted as the psychology of Bush. Don’t presume that they speak for all Muslims or all Arabs, any more than you would assume that gangsta rappers speak for all blacks.

I only wish Bush had the maturity or mental fortitude to be that self-aware. I believe he has all of the behaviors you ascribe to him, but absolute and total indifference to public perception of him.

Surely there’s a phenomenon in child psychology that fits? uh… “frat-brat” syndrome, or “mommy’s little avenging devil” … something like that?

As an example, US election debates are essentialy about freedoms.. the right to choose, the right to have one’s relationship recognised by law, the right to smoke.. it goes on and on… every single issue is basically about whether one section of a society is prepared to allow another section do something else.

Everyone hates everyone else’ freedom… we all hate any attempt made by anyone to curb or determine our lifestyles.

The argument is therefore pretty much moot.

For those on the ground in the occupied territories, the division of the region is the nearest root cause… whilst the US and Israel’s ongoing policies and actions have been the core issue ever since. Don’t make it up… just ask them. They are the best judges of their own pains and fear.

However, to blame this all on support for Israel and discount the genuine antipathy of Muslim extremists for Western values and freedoms is simply naive. Israel is a vanishingly small portion of the Middle East. The body count on terrorist attacks shows a complete lack of concern for the safety of Palestinians on the part of the terrorists. Believing that Muslims go to heaven as martyrs when killed in Jihad, the terrorists actually think they are doing Palestinians a favour by killing them. Nesrallah isn’t after Zionists; he said that it would be better if all Jews came to Israel, so that he would be able to kill them all. Israel is a political red herring, played up by dictators and populist demagogues in the Middle East to keep their people distracted from the real issues. And it works–the people fall for it, the DSB fell for it, and even you fell for it.

Good fences make good neighbours, as the old saying goes, but the internet and the flow of culture from America has brought American values directly into the homes of millions of people in the Middle East. The fences have come down. This challenges the ideological monopoly of the clerics, and what they really want us to do is shut up; they want to stop the flow of information and influence at source, if possible. That means, yes, that they do actually oppose your freedoms. This may not be the view of the majority of the citizenry, but it is what is motivating the terrorist extremist groups, who are led by Imams and fight in the name of Islam. They’re afraid that if their own people get a taste of these freedoms, they might want them too, and the theocratic stranglehold that exists in their countries will end. So as much as I hate to agree with Bush on anything, Islamic terrorists really do hate your freedoms.