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Posted on 09/16/2001 8:53:04 PM PDT by Jean S

Of all history's great powers, from Athens and Rome to Byzantium and imperial Britain, none has aroused such a complex of feelings, positive and negative, that could go some way towards explaining a terrorist attack of the unfathomable hatred seen last week in the United States, followed by the outpouring of sadness and support from some of the very people that America's enemies claim to represent.

Outside US embassies, particularly in the poorer parts of the world, there is almost always a long, clamouring crowd of visa seekers desperate for their chance at the American dream. In the same cities, and often enough outside the same embassies, other impassioned crowds will gather at the slimmest pretext to protest against America and to shout for its downfall. In recent days, when the crowds have returned, it has been, invariably, to weep and to mourn.

Such paradoxes present themselves almost everywhere, but nowhere more starkly than in the Arab and wider Muslim worlds. There, bitter political grievances abound, among them: the US support of Israel in its confrontation with the Palestinians; its troop presence in the "holy land" of the Arabian peninsula; its military encirclement and economic strangulation of Iraq; its alliances with governments across the Middle East and Asia that are widely perceived as corrupt.

But the complaints are often accompanied by an unquenchable appetite for Marlboro cigarettes and Levi jeans and adoration, of course, of the two Michaels, Jackson and Jordan, as well as of that more recent American icon, Tiger Woods. These enthusiasms are inseparable from the deprivation that besets much of the world, and a yearning for the bounty of America.

Freedom, to those without it, is irresistible, too. Among those who spend exhausting days in visa line-ups in Beijing, Cairo or Islamabad, it is this sense of America as a place where every man can pursue his dreams that comes pouring through, as it has for the fettered of the world since America's beginnings.

"America, free!" the visa seekers say, even if they are the only two English words they have.

But to be free, rich and powerful in a world that is mostly none of these things is, inevitably, to engender resentments. Freedom can be considered deeply disturbing in many of the world's poorer societies that are anchored to the old pillars of faith, tradition and submission.

A young American woman arriving in an Indian village to propagate birth control, for instance, may be a harbinger of improved health, prosperity and choice, but she may also be considered a dire threat to the village's ancient mores. Much the same can be said for the flood of American popular culture.

When the Taliban began its rule in Afghanistan in 1996 by hanging TV sets from trees, banning radios and tape recorders, and outlawing music and films, it was at the extreme edge of an uneasiness that is widespread in traditional societies that have begun to feel inundated by Western, and particularly American, culture.

Americans, with the richness of intermingling cultures, can find it difficult to grasp how vulnerable other societies can feel as their own cultures begin to erode.

This anxiety has found a ready focus in American rock music and in Hollywood movies. But even with the Taliban's draconian restrictions on Western lifestyles and women - or, just as likely, because of them - the blockbuster movie Titanic became so popular that it spawned a fad in hairstyles among men wanting to look like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Islamic terror groups have their own ideology, rooted in a deeply conservative reading - and, Islamic moderates say, a distortion - of the Koran, Islam's holy book. They reject American values such as democracy, tolerance and respect for individual rights, then rouse their followers by arguing that the US violates those principles in its support for Israel and with the sanctions that stifle Iraq.

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi militant based in Afghanistan, rails against American "falsehood" in claiming that principle drives its interaction with the world, even as he mocks the values he says the US violates.

No doubt organisations such as bin Laden's Al-Qaeda group feed off broader resentments against the US.

Often, in discussions with Islamic militants, anger over Israel or Iraq or Bosnia spills over into a recounting of more personal experiences, sometimes trifling, sometimes not, in which encounters with America - time spent working in menial jobs or studying in the US, or a brush with US immigration authorities - stirred resentments that became a trigger for antagonism. But even in these cases, there is sometimes a lingering sense of kinship with another America, the America of unrequited yearnings.

It is this duality, in part, that makes it possible for American reporters to work, more or less safely, in places such as the Taliban-ruled parts of Afghanistan that, on their face, are profoundly hostile to the US.

During one cold night four years ago spent sheltering with a group of soldiers at a remote mountain checkpoint, the sight of a reporter's satellite telephone produced amazed whispers among the soldiers, and then, in perfect English, a quiet request. "I have a brother in Detroit," a man said. "Would you mind if I call him?"

But on the core issues between America and Islam, the ones that have inspired terror attacks, the US stares across an unbridgeable gulf.

Anybody travelling in the Muslim world in recent years has sensed how even more moderate Muslims have been swept by an ascent of anger against the United States, particularly over Israel and Iraq, and sensed, too, that this fury was all the greater for the sense that official America, at least, was indifferent to the causes of their rage.

In the aftermath of last week's attacks, this anger seemed suddenly stilled, among a vast majority of the world's 1 billion Muslims, as if those who cried for some accounting from the US, and remained silent during earlier terror attacks, had never imagined that the radical groups could carry it to such cataclysmic extremes.

The New York Times

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