It is a question of US policy [Archives:2002/38/Viewpoint]

My email box was bombarded by hundreds of email messages during the last week from American readers who expressed their total outrage at what I wrote in my opinion last week entitled “Has the US learnt a lesson?” But it is also true that I received a significant number of opinions from other Americans supporting my views to a large extent.
Nevertheless, I do respect the opinion of our dear American readers, who have shown they are indeed quite patriotic and love their country. But in any case, I have never ever accused Americans as a people or nation of anything. It seems that many of our American readers have misunderstood, as in many cases in the past, my viewpoint concerning the USA.
There is no doubt that Americans as a people have nothing to do with the wrongdoings directly or indirectly done and still being done by US policies. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t have an obligation. On the contrary, because there are wrong policies done by the administration they elected, the American people should correct the wrongdoings of their government through their questionings and objections. It is up to them to make the change needed and correct to the wrong policies of the US government.
On many occasions in the past, critiques coming from journalists and intellectuals from other nations made many Americans research, study and try to understand what is wrong with their government’s policies.
Thankfully, many of those Americans saw light and realized that their government is also human and commits mistakes. Instead of blindly defending their government’s policies, those enlightened Americans started to look into the issue with greater vision and with a balanced viewpoint.
Eventually, it is only Americans who will benefit more than anyone else in the world if they look into their government’s policies, see where it went wrong, and apply corrective measures because at the end of the day, some ongoing wrong US policies could lead to destructive consequences to the US citizens themselves.
You may be wondering why a person in a far away and tiny country called Yemen objects to the US policies. But if you put yourself in my shoes, and come over to our place and see the daily indignation of Yemenis towards the US support to Israeli aggression against civilian Palestinians, and the threats of a strike against Iraq, which could lead to massacres of innocent civilians, then you would probably know why we are loudly protesting your country’s policies.
It is not only me who speaks in this manner; there are thousands and tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim journalists who share the same opinion. This is in fact a direct reflection of the opinion of millions of Arabs, Muslims, and many third-world countries of the world. I won’t be surprised if a significant portion of citizens in many developed countries think the same way too.
Hence, I feel that instead of accusing me of hating America because it resembles the ‘free’ and ‘developed’ world, why don’t some of our valuable American readers who responded ruthlessly to my opinion look into the core of the problem. Sticking our heads in the sand and presuming that everything is just fine is simply a slow and gradual suicide attempt.
They say smoke doesn’t come unless there is fire.
We found the smoke in September 11, 2001.
And now it is up to Americans to find out where is the fire!

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