Why Do They Hate Us?

Robert Lane Greene writes in TRN why changes in US policy will not placate the Islamo-fascists.

The real issue, as Bernard Lewis has argued, is that Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers are in permanent and furious denial of the state of the contemporary Muslim world. We are getting close to Al Qaeda's real motivation, I believe, when bin Laden's chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, swears that "the tragedy of al-Andalus"--that is the reconquest of Spain by Christians, completed in 1492--must not be repeated. The Islamic world, once a united empire boasting the world's most advanced culture, is today a patchwork of mostly poor, despotic states that lag behind the rest of the world in political, economic, and cultural development. Modern Islamists are drastically out of step with the modern world; they know it and they hate it. They cannot be placated by any change in American policy, whether reasonable or far-fetched. They can only be satisfied by the reestablishment of an Islamic caliphate, governed by sharia, from Morocco to Indonesia. As such, American strategy in the "war on terrorism" (better described as a war on members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups) is justifiably one-pronged, with that prong being the killing or capturing of Islamist militants.

As Debbie Maimon further elaborates in Yated Ne'eman,

The crux of the problem is that civilized men are dealing with a seventh-century culture that cannot comes to terms with civilization.

The Islamic world, once a united empire boasting the world’s most advanced culture, is today a host of poor, despotic states that lag behind the rest of the world in political, economic, and cultural development.