Word: ladens
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Nine days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush told the U.S. Congress, "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?'" Unlocking the mystery of what motivates Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden has become the most urgent intellectual challenge of our time. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies is the latest attempt to solve the puzzle of Islamic rage-and it is possibly the most provocative. Its authors, Ian Buruma, a respected commentator on Asian affairs, and Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, assert that the ideas inspiring...
...media tend to boil it down to this: the cultures of the U.S. and Europe, with their heritage of democracy, civil liberties and women's rights, are doomed to collide with Islam, which is trapped by tradition into cherishing an opposite set of values-and that men like bin Laden are born out of this collision of two different world views...
...Buruma and Margalit. They argue that when bin Laden and his acolytes accuse the U.S. and Europe of decadence, materialism and sexual immorality, they are largely recycling ideas and language that originated in the West. The authors point out that even as Western Europe and America began evolving into liberal democracies with capitalist economies, a countercurrent of opposition accused the newly emerging "modern" world of being devoid of spirituality. In the arts, Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Blake charged that industrialization was stripping people of their individuality and their connection to the past, while in politics, Karl Marx accused capitalism...
...Eliot poem denouncing the ungodliness of modern cities to the frenzy that prompted the attack on the World Trade Center. Occidentalism might not provide a conclusive answer to the question "Why do they hate us?" But by relating how much of the rhetoric that fuels men like bin Laden came originally from the West, it makes the distinction between "them" and "us" murkier than we previously realized...
...Hunt for Osama As we reported in "Did Clinton Do Enough?" [UNITED STATES, April 26], the 9/11 commission interviewed former President Bill Clinton about the steps his Administration took to stop Osama bin Laden. Clinton's statements have not been fully disclosed, but here's what we reported 51/2 years ago about what the Clinton White House...