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Editorial: Search for the truth, not a scapegoat

Nothing can make Tuesday's attacks in the US forgivable. But something is needed to make them understandable.

We do not, at the time of writing, know who is responsible for the attacks. The US' favorite bogeyman, fugitive Saudi financier Osama bin Laden, is a key suspect, but bin Laden has said that while he is thankful for the attacks he is not responsible for them. With even his Taliban protectors saying they are willing to give him up to US justice if the Americans can show evidence of his involvement, protesting innocence is only prudent. But there are several other possible suspects: Islamic Jihad, Hamas, some radical PLO splinter group, or, seeing that the scale of the attacks and the degree of coordination suggest state-level intervention, the Iranians or Saddam Hussein.

Given that the US would dearly like to go to war with someone over Tuesday's events, even their most belligerent opponents are keeping their heads down. "It's too early to say we know who did it," the Associated Press quoted Gene Poteat, a former CIA scientific analyst, now president of Association of Former Intelligence Officers, as saying. "It's very clear that it's hatred of the United States that is behind [the attacks]."

Obviously. The problem is at the moment that along with the whodunit there is so much fulmination as the US intends to "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts" -- according to President George W. Bush -- because as Secretary of State Colin Powell says: "You don't attack America like this and get away with it."

The more the pity then that rational people are not asking themselves why the US should be so hated. Yet the catalogue of suspects alone points to the probable reason like an arrow. The US is hated by a substantial number of people because of its hypocrisy and duplicity in the Middle East.

The reality of the situation is ill-served by talking of cowardice -- it takes some courage, however misguided, to fly a plane into a building -- or even evil, as the willful taking of human life must necessarily be seen.

The US portrays itself as a beacon of hope, freedom and liberty. If it lived up to its self-image, why would anybody hate it? The problem is that to the average Palestinian refugee, his land stolen by the state of Israel, condemned to exile in a Middle Eastern diaspora or the filth and poverty of the West Bank and Gaza, America is none of those things. Rather it is the mighty backer of the regime that stole his land and shoots his children and condemns him to a hopeless struggle to survive. No wonder there were reports of rejoicing in the streets of Nablus and East Jerusalem yesterday.

During the Cold War the US was unashamedly partisan. The Cold War ended, Oslo and the peace process came about, but unbelievably, things got worse. Washington pretends now to be an even-handed adjudicator of the rights and wrongs of both sides, yet it remains absolutely unable to condemn the vilest outrages by the Israeli authorities. Hypocrisy and duplicity.

As we said, this does not justify the terrible events of Tuesday, but it might explain it. Terrorist movements are born out of the reaction to historical unfairness that seems irremediable any other way. The prism of flattering self-image can be peculiarly distorting. Americans do not believe that they can be unjust, even in the Middle East, just as Englishmen cannot believe that their 800-year colonial occupation of Ireland was oppressive. But that is the uncomfortable -- and sometimes deadly -- reality. The wind is sown and the whirlwind is reaped.

If any good can come out of Tuesday's tragedy, then, let us hope that it's not the worldwide anti-terrorist crusade the US was promising yesterday but that those virtues which the US -- and other countries -- exalt, might be honored less often only in the breech.
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