why do they hate us?

Seven years after 9/11, the NYT’s Michael Slackman visits Cairo and finds a lot of people who insist on believing that America attacked itself on that day in order to pick a fight with Muslims. Slackman concludes that this obstinate conspiratorial thinking is an American failure:

Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.

“Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.”

It must be comforting to be Michael Slackman and to think that if only America and Israel would prove themselves worthy, then everything would be all right with the world.

That mind-set plays well in Europe

And, apparently, the “world wants Obama as president.” Maybe so, but the world doesn’t get to vote in our election.

And saying that America is to blame for its poor image abroad doesn’t play very well at home. In his acceptance speech at the RNC, John McCain said:

My fellow Americans, when I’m president, we’re going to embark on the most ambitious national project in decades. We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much. We will attack the problem on every front. We will produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells offshore, and we’ll drill them now. We will build more nuclear power plants. We will develop clean coal technology. We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas. We will encourage the development and use of flex-fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles. … It’s an ambitious plan, but Americans are ambitious by nature, and we have faced greater challenges. It’s time for us to show the world again how Americans lead.

And the crowd roared.

Some countries don’t like us very much. They didn’t like us before 9/11, and they still don’t like us now. That, my friends, is their problem.