What's behind hatred for U.S.?

Emotionally spent by last week's attacks, many Americans wonder why they're so despised.
By RON COLE
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
Amid the exhausting, gut-wrenching emotions of horror, fear, grief and anger that Americans suffered through this past week, the underlying feeling for many remains one of simple confusion.
Television images of innocent New Yorkers tumbling from skyscrapers side by side with video of Palestinian men, women and children celebrating in the streets left Americans dumbfounded.
Why are we hated so much?
"It's a great question," said Dr. Mark Daniels, professor of government and public affairs at Slippery Rock University.
"That's what we're really dealing with here. This terrorism is really based on a consuming hatred for all things connected with the American government," he said.
History behind it: Resentment toward the United States, especially in the Middle East, is nothing new, dating to at least the 1940s, said Dr. Lowell Satre, history professor at Youngstown State University.
After World War II, Britain and France withdrew from its former colonial states in Palestine and other sections of the Middle East, leaving the United States as the power broker in the region, he said.
"The distrust and dislike of the British and the French to a great extent was inherited by the United States," Satre said. "It is a spinoff of the old imperial world."
The resentment has grown in the decades since, and oil is one of the leading reasons, experts say.
"Our whole economy is based on Middle Eastern oil, so for that reason we have made certain that governments are in power there that provide us with the stability which we need to extract their oil," Daniels said.
The United States supports those governments even if they aren't in the best interests of the people in those countries, said Dr. Omar Altalib, a native of Iraq, now an assistant professor of sociology at Ashland University in Ohio.
"Our country isn't always right and we have sometimes been on the wrong side of issues around the world, and there are people who really feel the United States has perpetrated injustices on them," said Dr. John Green, director of the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
Different cultures: "We've gone into a lot of places and assumed that they ought to think and behave like us, when the underpinnings of their cultures didn't believe in that," said Dr. Martha Pallante, chairwoman of YSU's history department.
"There are many people around the world who have different ways of thinking from us," said Dr. Mark Rubin, director of Kent State University's Center for International and Comparative Programs. "What we may think is right, humane and just, they may not."
And then there's Israel, which has garnered historically strong support from the United States as a strategic, democratic Middle East ally.
"We have supported Israel for good reasons, but it has put us at the opposite end of a political spectrum," Pallante said.
Daniels said: "The hatred against Israel is beyond anyone's intellectual comprehension."
But the resentment goes even deeper than politics.
English is now the international language. The U.S. dollar is the currency of the world. The United States' influence is far-reaching on many different fronts.
"We are the most powerful nation militarily," Green said. "We are dominant economically, and I think that's bound to produce resentment."
Western culture -- from rock 'n' roll music and bluejeans to Coca-Cola and McDonald's -- is pervasive and seeping into every corner of the world.
American media: "People don't like the dominance of American media, particularly entertainment," said Altalib, who was born in northern Iraq, but came to the United States when he was a year old. "They get all the movies and the songs that come from America that depict Americans as violent and immoral and crude."
"They view it as being absolutely ungodly and satanic," Daniels said.
"Some people feel we're exercising some kind of cultural imperialism," Rubin said.
The resentment turns to hate when someone like Saudi-exile Osama bin Laden, a suspect in Tuesday's attacks in New York and on the Pentagon, begins spreading violent, anti-American rhetoric.
"Then some people go too far in their resentment and start feeling hatred," Altalib said.
Green emphasized that there's much more support worldwide for the United States than hatred, reflected in the outpouring of support by nations around the world after last week's attacks.
"Everybody doesn't hate us by any stretch of the imagination," he said. "The United States has many, many friends around the world. And even in the countries where these terrorists groups come from, there are a substantial number of people who admire the United States."