Special Section: At War - Why They Hate Us: Sources of terror in the Arab world.(Brief Article)

They danced in the streets of the West Bank towns and in Gaza when they heard the news. They danced in parts of Lebanon. In Baghdad, state television played a song called "Down with America" as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. To these and their kind, the fact that many innocent people far away were killed is cause for rejoicing. They are possessed by hate, a simple thing that reduces everything and everybody to a simple perspective. Our tribe good, destined for victory-their tribe bad, destined for destruction. Us or Them.

There are of course many millions of Arabs and Muslims, including Iraqis and Palestinians, who do not rejoice, who repudiate this horror committed in their name, and who hope against hope that it is not as it seems, that Arabs and Muslims are not responsible. These are educated people, often secular in outlook, at home in Western culture as well as their own. They are as threatened as the rest of the civilized world by Islamic fanaticism. Only the bravest of them, though, will dare to say what they think, for fear of persecution and assassination. Now and again, the fanatics threaten to overthrow the local rulers. There follow such ghastly tests of strength as the flattening of the town of Hama by the late Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad, and the ongoing civil wars in Algeria and Sudan. Here too are cases of Us or Them, though both sides are Muslim.

Democracy is essentially a process of compromise between conflicting interests according to mutually agreed rules. This arises from an understanding that the alternative is a test of strength in which the strong will send the weak to the wall with no justice. Democracy means Us and Them. Yet nothing in the history or the culture of Arabs and Muslims allows them to put this into any form of political practice. From long ago they have inherited a cast-iron absolute system, in which the ruler does as he pleases, and the rest have no redress, indeed going to the wall. In the absence of inherent processes of compromise at any level of society, it is not a coincidence that absolute Muslim rulers are engaged in tests of strength everywhere with people of other religious persuasions: Hindus in Kashmir, Christians and animists in Africa, Buddhists in China and Indonesia, Jews in Israel.

Hate begins here, in the flagrant injustice and violence of daily life, in the corruption of the rich and the mindless poverty of the poor, in the absence of proper social mechanisms to do anything about it. And who is responsible for this? It requires a rather special character to be able to lay the blame for social failure where it properly belongs, on the people who comprise one's own society. Much easier, more satisfying, to blame everybody except oneself. And haven't Westerners themselves been putting their shoulders to that wheel by reiterating for many years that the plight of Arabs and Muslims has nothing to do with their ...