Theory Is Taught So As To Make

The Sense Of Islam As A Threatening Other - With Muslims Depicted As Fanatical, Violent, Lustful, Irrational - Develops During The Colonial Period In What I Called Orientalism. The Study Of The Other Has A Lot To Do With The Control And Dominance Of Europe And The West Generally In The Islamic World. And It Has Persisted Because It's Based Very, Very Deeply In Religious Roots, Where Islam Is Seen As A Kind Of Competitor Of Christianity.

It's Very Hard, For Example, To Justify The Thirty-four-year Occupation Of The West Bank And Gaza. It's Very Hard To Justify 140 Israeli Settlements And Roughly 400,000 Settlers. These Actions Were Taken With The Support And Financing Of The United States.

Speaking As A New Yorker, I Found It A Shocking And Terrifying Event [9/11], Particularly The Scale Of It. At Bottom, It Was An Implacable Desire To Do Harm To Innocent People. It Was Aimed At Symbols: The World Trade Center, The Heart Of American Capitalism, And The Pentagon, The Headquarters Of The American Military Establishment.

There Is Also This Great Sense Of Triumphalism, That Just As We Defeated The Soviet Union, We Can Do This. And Out Of This Sense Of Desperation And Pathological Religion, There Develops An All-encompassing Drive To Harm And Hurt, Without Regard For The Innocent And The Uninvolved, Which Was The Case In New York.

The History Of Other Cultures Is Non-existent Until It Erupts In Confrontation With The United States.