Maybe if we didn't rape & murder they wouldn't hate us for our freedoms.

Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped murdering thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, THEY wouldn't hate us for our freedoms, or for our hamburgers or whatever reasons they hate us for.

Maybe if we didn't stick our fat asses into everybody else's business and steal from them and invade them and torture them and conquer them and murder them and bomb them and burn them and slaughter them, maybe, just maybe they would stop hating us for our freedoms.

al Qaeda have always been big fans of murder in any context.

20-30 years? "We" i.e. the American govt. "steal from them and invade them and torture them and conquer them and murder them and bomb them and burn them and slaughter them" for decades upon decades. And thats just the arabs. Our government created Al-Qaeda.

Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden created al Qaeda, and from its inception its interest has been in restoring the Caliphate, not fucking with Americans. We are responsible for a lot of bad action in that region, but we aren't responsible for creating al Qaeda. The islamist movement would exist with our without the United States' involvement in that region.

...but we supplied them with money and weapons from their inception.

(snip) The origins of this group (at a later time given the name 'al-Qaeda' by the United States Department of Justice) can be traced to a few weeks after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when a cadre of non-Afghani, Arab Muslim fighters joined the largely United States Saudi Arabian and Pakistan-funded Afghan mujāhidīn anti-Soviet resistance movement (a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation forces and the Soviet-backed Afghan government).

(snip) Al-Qaeda evolved from the Maktab al-Khadamat (Office of Services, MAK) — a Mujahidin organization fighting to establish an Islamic state during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a founding member of the MAK, along with Palestinian militant Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The role of the MAK was to channel funds from a variety of sources (including donations from across the Middle East) into training Mujahidin from around the world in guerrilla combat, and to transport the combatants to Afghanistan. The MAK was mostly funded by donations from wealthy Muslim individuals but was also allegedly aided by the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and indirectly by the United States, which channeled most of its support and military hardware via the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alqaeda

I think the OP was making the observation that rape and murder leads to violence.

Like when US troops rape and murder Iraqi girls, then that leads to the torture and murder of US troops. I was amazed at the number of Americans appalled at the incident where the two unfortunate US soldiers were kidnapped and horribly murdered. I was appalled at the horror of it--many people I spoke to were appalled at the idea that this would happen to Americans! Why? I asked. Because "we're the good guys!" was the answer. They tended to forget that the essential lesson from that horrific episode was this: don't rape and murder Iraqi girls. But I fear this was a lesson lost on many Americans.

And I was making the point that the OP was making an extremely general statement which isn't applicable in all cases. al Qaeda's distaste for the US has very little to do with any rape, murder, or violence committed by the United States. Their ideology is far more general - anybody who doesn't agree with them deserves to die, regardless of their actions.

That kind of would have stayed with me I think.

Don

And that is pretty much what our government has done in recent years. And yes, that "Shock and Awe" campaign pretty much pushed the envelope. How else were the Iraqis to react to our uberdestructive arrival, with "Let the Motherfuckers burn!" on our intercoms and "Iraqi men have no balls!" (in THEIR language) on the loudspeakers! Those who were inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt must have had egg on their faces. ("What do they mean by 'balls,' Mama?") We really don't know how to do this, and maybe there IS no good way, but what has ensued was inevitable from the start. I remember ne little film clip of an old Afghan man asking an American soldier, "Can't you see the difference between the Talibanis and the normal Afghans?" and I had to admit to myself that my honest answer to him would have to be "No, I'm sorry, I can't, I really have a lot of trouble doing that although I am sure there must be such a difference." I am ashamed to admit that, but it is true. And it is even more true of the people who would order (or even allow) our troops to play crude gratuitous inflammatory insults on loudspeakers as they roll in, do indiscriminate bombing, and routinely tortures which used to be the hallmark of the Commies and the Nazis. I still want to know the answer to this question about the Abu Ghraib prison pictures so proudly taken by Lindsay Englund and her fellow scape goats: Just who did they take those pictures for? They aren't the kind of pictures you send home to Mom! Those pictures were clearly intended to show somebody higher up that orders were being carried out.