This is the question most often asked after 9/11/2001. We think of ourselves as "good", and we believe that, for the most part, we've done good in the world, so where does the hate come from? Why would anyone "hate our freedoms"?
It 's really not that complicated. Let's begin with humiliation, which according to Thomas Friedman is the most overlooked factor in international relations. People who are humiliated become angry, and angry people lash out. A study of the emergence of modernism in Western Europe, followed as it was by the emergence of colonialism, shows clearly that many parts of the Muslim world feel humiliated by their former colonizers (e.g. Great Britain, France). The ease with which these European powers rolled over various Muslim nations, and the contempt they showed for the colonized, explain a lot about Muslim resentment of the West, including the United States (even if we were never colonizers ourselves in the same sense).
The second factor is contained, almost in its entirety, in the title of Chris Hedges' book "War is a Force that Gives us Meaning". In today's mediated world, those singled out by the media for attention seem to have more value than those who are not. A life lived without media attention can be experienced as a nullity, a life without meaning. There's a quick cure for that, and that is to become a terrorist. These days no one gets more attention from the media that those who commit terrorist acts, or even those who are merely arrested on suspicion of terrorism without having committed any act.
It's often been noted that, in America's inner cities, many young males are inducted into the drug trade because, when you're a drug dealer, you're somebody. Who would want to work for "chump change" at the car wash when you can earn many times that on the corners, and have some "bling" to show for it besides? The same logic works to attract young males to terrorism as well.
The hard fact is that access to constructive work is restricted in our economy. Only those with four-year college degrees are even considered, and not all those are ultimated accepted. People who cannot get through this gate often find that the only alternatives are Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or perhaps driving a taxi. These are not careers of which one can be proud, not careers which satisfy peoples' craving for meaning and a sense of accomplishment. The millions (billions) of under-utilized people in today's world economy are a rich recruiting field for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
Now the first factor, the humiliation factor, will ease with time, if we conduct ourselves intelligently (which regrettably we haven't so far). As for the second, that's going to be a problem for a very long time. The way things are going, the productive global economy is going to be in need of fewer and fewer people as it evolves, which is going to leave the excluded, which could easily be a large majority, with nothing meaningful to do with their lives. Recent history shows us that people who are denied meaning through legitimate channels will find it in their own way, and that sometimes acts of nihilistic terror are the result.
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