From http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/19/mideast/qaeda.php:
“In Al Qaeda’s first response to the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who will continue a campaign against Islam begun by President George W. Bush.”
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“American officials dismissed the new video as spin control and a desperate tactic by a terror group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas when the United States elected a black president with a Muslim name.”
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“And in a blunt personal attack on the new president, Zawahiri painted Obama as a hypocrite and traitor to his race, unfavorably comparing him to ‘honorable black Americans’ like Malcolm X, the 1960s black Muslim leader. The Qaeda video drew extensively on archival footage of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling in prayer at a mosque.”
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You all know I don’t especially like our new President-elect, but I’d point to this as a case-in-point that we’re still hated by extremists the world over. Personally, I think it’s a Good Thingâ„¢ that we are – if we weren’t, we’d be either a bunch of wishy-washy assholes who don’t believe in anything, or we’d be just as fanatical; neither of those appeal to me.
Your dichotomy in the last paragraph is false. There is a third option and that is that we could be respectful enough of other countries and people that we do not give them a reason to hate us. That is not the same as being “wish-washy ***holes” (I’m guessing you don’t have kids, since you don’t seem to watch your language much).
I’ll agree that it’s not a full dichotomy, certainly some countries just aren’t interesting enough to hate or love (take any small country that pretty much keeps to itself and doesn’t have crazies of any stripe running around whacking each other for political reasons – for example, Chile or Micronesia).
Personally, I think we are pretty respectful of most other countries – excluding, for good reason, the ones who already hate us because we’re rich|non-muslim|not-them|some-other-ideology-at-play. Before the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism, there were certainly others at play on the world stage: religious, political, ethnic, and otherwise.
I think the only way to be not a ‘useful’ target to any organization (terror or governmental) is to be a small enough player that what you have nobody else cares about. For that to happen to the US, our economy would have to freed from such deep ties to others around the world, we’d need to have fewer natural resources, a smaller population, no reason for folks to want to immigrate here, and be otherwise worse-off than those places that currently hate us.