Egyptian protests present major challenge to American foreign policy

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 09:00:00 -0500

While most of American attention in recent days has been focused on Libya, where four American diplomats died, the bigger trouble may be brewing in Egypt. People are protesting there too, and while no one is getting killed, the long-term effect of the chill on Egyptian-American relations may be startling.

Nikos Retsos

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 09:51:38 -0500

The Arabs have always hated us as the maintainers of the state of Israel, and of the Arab autocrats and bloody dictators in the Gulf who would have been overthrown long time ago without the U.S. back up. And the 30 years of U.S. support for Mubarak in Egypt, and 32 years of Support for Saleh in Yemen cost thousands of Egyptian and Yemeni lives before the U.S. finally decided to allow the Egyptians and Yemenis to push them out. And those 30 + years of bottled up anti-U.S. hostility has now boiled over - lit by the anti-Islamic video on U-Tube.

In addition, the constant U.S. warmongering against Iran, and the constant U.S. bombing in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, has ingrained in the brain of Muslims the belief that the U.S. regards them as disposable sub-humans! There is, therefore, a simmering anti-American hatred across the the Muslim world, and that hatred feeds the Islamist jihadists in Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and many other tribal sub-groups from Morocco to Pakistan, and from Chechnya to Yemen!

Let's not, therefore, put the blame squarely on Arabs and Muslims for the current anti-American wave across Middle East. We have treated many Muslims as chickens, cooped up by pro-U.S. dictators for decades, and then slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and tortured thousands of others, while we still keep others in prison for life without trial.

Honestly, they don't regard us as civilized humans, and the video trashing their religion's prophet now was the wick that lit the current anti-U.S. fireball across the Middle East. We, and our foreign policy toward Muslims, need some serious review and introspection! We cannot brand as terrorist any Muslim who dislike our "might is right" imperial policy, and then use the massive Western media to portray ourselves as saints and them as the global scum of humanity! As the 120 nation Non-Aligned Movement in Iran 2 weeks ago proved, the majority of the people in the planet are against us - not against Muslims! Nikos Retsos, retired professor, USA

PRI: Public Radio International

Egyptian protests present major challenge to American foreign policy

Nikos Retsos