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Asserting principles
U.S. gave impression that fanatics would be spared no matter what

By Omid Parsi
October 12, 2001
The Iranian

"Why do they hate us so much?" This is an incessantly asked question baffling all ordinary people and sending assorted liberal historians and dim excuse artists to dig decades deep into the history of US foreign policy for minor infractions and misdemeanors against our haters and present them as a logical answer.

If there was no present context to this question, one would think that "They" would refer to the Vietnamese or the Japanese that have tasted direct senseless violence of hellish magnitude from America. Unfortunately they are not the ones who hate us! Few people have thought that they hate us because we have allowed them to. In that respect we only have ourselves and our own ignorance (or naivete if you want to call it) to blame.

We created an Islamic Jurrassic park in Afghanistan by arming illiterate Islamic militants against the Soviet Union, a modern superpower that could have developed Afghanistan out of its sheperding economy. We gloriously succeeded then but now we have to go get the dinosaurs. We created an Islamic Disneyworld in the oil rich Middle East because we decided that it would be fair to buy the oil rather than just take it.

At our own expense, we made low class trust fund kids out of savage Bedouin tribesmen. Now we have to watch the whole lousy bunch so that their persistent inferiority complex, cultural illiteracy, existential futility and general lack of self-esteem does not lead them to spend their gratuitous fortune and idle lives scheming to blow us up.

We are guilty of weakness. We are weak because instead of asserting our principles, we have them up for "discussion". We appear weak because we seem to be all "reason" and no "faith" or "instinct". We favor "dialogue" after we have been kicked in the nuts.

When Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his writing, the British chose to "protect" him by putting him under house arrest in his own country where thousands of Islamic zealots, our beloved imported fellow citizens living prosperous and free lives in "Great" Britain, vowed to carry out their holy duty! That was an instance where our principle of freedom of speech was "discussed" instead of "asserted".

The world would have a much different perception of us if the British would have made Knomeini's right to exist conditional upon his retraction of his senseless "fatwa". (Khomeini, long considered to be an uncompromising man of "faith", unequivocally decalred his cowardly capability to eat his own words and "drink the cup of poison", unfortunately only figuratively, at the culmination of the Iran-Iraq war.)

Trying hard to avoid "confrontation", our civilization has presented itself as a bunch of spineless cowards. We gave a message to all the savages of the backward world that they actually have more power than we do, because we do not look like we have the guts to use our superior power. We are a paper tiger incapable of "wrath".

We left Saddam Hossein off the hook, because we thought we would look bad getting rid of a diminished blood-thirsty despot, thus we gave the likes of the Taliban the impression that they would be spared no matter what. We are guilty of not being able to show that we can literally unleash more destructive power than god. Maybe if we did the Islamic bushmen would see a real life miracle and bow to us, as the hand of god.

Comment for The Iranian letters section Comment to the writer Omid Parsi