A very interesting article [link|http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/09/23/stiusausa01024.html|http://www.sunday-t...sa01024.html]
Here are some relevant quotes:
"Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.
"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."
...
So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader.
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The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder."