(Salman) Rushdie Says Bush Policies Help Islamic Terrorism (Reuters)

(you have to know somethings wrong, when even Salman Rushdie even thinks you're screwing up)

Rushdie Says Bush Policies Help Islamic Terrorism

Tue Apr 12, 2005 05:05 PM ET

By Mark Egan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bush administration helps the cause of Islamic terrorism by failing to engage in serious dialogue with the international community, author Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday. Rushdie -- infamous for living for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 pronouncement that his novel "The Satanic Verses" was blasphemous -- said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too. "What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is ... the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it," Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.

Rushdie said he found it striking how the "colossal sympathy" the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly. "It seems really remarkable that the moment you leave America ... you find not just America's natural enemies, but America's natural allies talking in language more critical than I, in my life, have ever heard about the United States," he said.

The novelist, born in India and raised in Britain, attributed the shift in sentiment toward the United States to the Bush administration's "unilateralist policies" and its "unwillingness to engage with the rest of the world in a serious way." "This go-it-alone attitude gets people's backs up," he said of President Bush's foreign policy.

LACK OF LISTENING

As president of the PEN American Center, a writers group, Rushdie helped organize an international literary festival this week in New York -- an event he hopes will help restore global dialogue. "There seems to have been a breach in our ability to listen to each other," he said. "It's really important at this particular moment in the history of the world that ordinary American people should get as broad a sense of how the world is thinking." Continued ...

All our "friends" have been proped up with US dollars and are behind terrorism and all our enemies have nothing to do with terrorism. We are the biggest exporters of terrorists in the world and created and trained Al qada and bin Ladin. Everything the "terrorists" demond, bush does. Too much going on. Secret agendas everywhere.