Published on Thursday, September 20, 2001 in USA Today
Despair Feeds Hatred, Extremism
by Sandy Tolan
 
An hour after the attacks, I was sitting catatonic at my
computer screen, trying to get some news, when my neighbor
poked his head in my office.

"Ever wonder," he asked, "why we're so hated? Fifty years
ago we were so beloved. What happened?"

His question penetrates the simple facade built in recent
days by the mass media: of America in a battle of Good
vs. Evil; of the attacks portrayed only as the work of
hate-filled religious zealots.

The men in the four doomed airliners were filled with hatred
and a twisted interpretation of Islam. But this explanation
alone is not sufficient. It does not account for the
flammable mix of rage and despair that has been building up
in the Middle East since the Gulf War's end.

Seven years ago, in Hebron in the West Bank, I attended a
funeral for a Hamas follower, shot by Israeli soldiers after
he lunged at them with acid. In the funeral tent, mourners
handed out candy to celebrate the martyr's ascent to
heaven. Afterward, in the street, young boys stopped their
laughing and roughhousing long enough to tell me that they,
too, hoped to grow up and die in such an honorable way.

My question then was like my neighbor's on Sept. 11: "Why?"

Decades of humiliation

As a journalist working regularly in the West Bank and Gaza,
I repeatedly witnessed the humiliation and anger of a
population living under decades of occupation: Israeli
bulldozers knocking over families' ancient stone homes and
uprooting their olive groves; military checkpoints,
sometimes eight or 10 within 15 miles, turning 20-minute
commutes into 3-hour odysseys; the sealing off of Jerusalem
and the third-holiest shrine in Islam to Muslims across the
West Bank; the confiscation of Jerusalem identification
cards, and hence citizenship, from Palestinian students
who'd been abroad for too long; the thirst of villagers
facing severe water shortages while Israeli settlers across
the fence grew green lawns and lounged by swimming pools;
U.S. M-16s used to shoot at stone-throwing boys.

Again and again, Palestinians asked me: Why does the
American superpower support this? Do ordinary Americans know
about this? Do they care?

Death tolls

It was no surprise when West Bank streets later filled with
men burning American flags and waving posters of Saddam
Hussein, given our country's lead role in sanctions against
Iraq. Children there were dying from dehydration and disease
-- a half-million excess deaths, according to a 1999 UNICEF
study, or 5,000 a month. This is almost the projected death
toll of the World Trade Center blasts.

Again, the questions: Do Americans know about this
suffering? Do they care?

At work in the Arab streets is the rage of the weak and
ignored. Young men, out of work and nearly out of hope, look
for someone to blame. In such an atmosphere of despair,
absent any perception of justice or equal treatment,
extremism grows. In its most perverse form, it helps turn
commercial airliners into flaming missiles, causing
unfathomable suffering.

It can be comforting to blame it all on the insane religious
fervor of The Other. Much harder is to understand that our
own failure to witness and address the suffering of others
-- the children of Iraq, for example -- has helped create
fertile recruiting ground for groups seeking vengeance with
the blood of innocents.

Now the network theme music pounds out the drumbeat of
war. Talk shows speak of "dusting off the nukes" and wiping
out entire countries. Last week, the deputy secretary of
defense spoke of a "sustained campaign" aimed at "ending
states who sponsor terrorism." (U.S. officials later said he
misspoke.)

But if the attacks on the United States lie just as much in
rage and a sense of injustice as they do in religious
fervor, will bombing a country senseless make us safer? Or
will it help perpetuate more rage, more hatred, more despair
-- and, quite possibly, more terror in the United States?

Sandy Tolan is an independent journalist and radio
documentary producer. He has won numerous awards for his
reporting on the Middle East.

Copyright 2001 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.