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ICH - The question Americans asked in the immediate aftermath of the horror of 9/11 was "Why do they hate us?" And in many American minds the "they" of the question were not only the violent Islamic fundamentalists who, according to the official version of events, were solely responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers, but Arabs and Muslims everywhere - about a quarter of humankind.

Since that particular shocking and awesome event, I have often asked myself how different the world today might have been - how much less destruction and killing there would have been - if President Bush had said something like: "That's a very good question. We must and will seek the answer to it before we decide how to respond."

If an attempt had been made to answer the question, the first thing that would have been established is that the overwhelming majority of Arabs and other Muslims everywhere do not hate Americans or America. If they could, very many Arabs and other Muslims, perhaps even half of them, would live in America to enjoy the apparently good life there.

What they hate is American foreign policy. And the underlying prime cause of that hatred is Congressional and White House support for the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong. But Israel’s American-endorsed arrogance of power and contempt for international law is only one of two factors in the equation that, over the past 60 years, has seen Arab and other Muslim hurt, anger and humliation turn to hatred on account of the conflict in and over Palestine. The other is the impotence of the regimes of the existing mainly corrupt and repressive Arab Order, regimes which, genereally speaking, are perceived by their masses to be, in effect, American-and-Zionist stooges… Read on!