Why Do They Hate Us? (asked in whiniest voice possible)

It doesn't matter why--their reasons are their reasons, not ours, and when their reasons don't make any sense at all, it makes no sense to try to respond to them. What some will call dismissive, I call common sense:

Like gawky teenagers, Americans are far too obsessed with what people thousands of miles away think of them. The first reaction of the ordinary man in the street on December 7, 1941, was not to wonder why the Japanese hated him. It was not even his tenth reaction because at that point he was much too busy hating the Japanese to care why they hated him.

That attitude might not be pretty, but it was a practical response to the exigencies of wartime, and that war, like most wars, was not fueled by emotion, but by territorial aggression. FDR was unconcerned with Japanese emotions, let alone their hearts, minds and livers; because he knew that the conflict did not come down to emotions but to a power struggle between a Japanese empire in the Pacific and the only Western country with a view of the Pacific capable of standing up to the land of the rising sun.

The study of Muslim rage, its wellsprings and tides, is as worthless as the study of Japanese rage in the dying days of the 1930s. Despite the showy displays of violence in the last week by inflamed Chinese mobs attacking Japanese properties and Muslim mobs attacking American properties, the conflicts do not revolve around the axis of emotion, but of power and territory.

The following was sent to an email list of which I am a member and I received permission from the author to post it here.  Its logic and truth are, to me, self-evident:

There's a certain world view that assumes all conflict is based on misunderstandings. And that if someone is attacking me it is just as much my fault because I didn't fully understand their grievances or their attack was a reasonable response to something I did.

The end-result of this world view is to first look at our own culpability in any conflict and when there is conflict not do anything that may escalate the violence.

(snip comments specifically related to the Benghazi fiasco)

The problem here isn't the inconsistencies or the existence of a supposed "cover-up". The problem is the misguided notion that there wouldn't be conflict if we just tried harder or were nicer or weren't as belligerent or understood our enemies better. It's a world view shared by most everyone in the administration and a cornerstone of liberal Foreign Policy.

But it tends to get people killed.

I'm not saying that it is impossible for a people or a nation to have a grievance against the United States. I am saying that trying to understand why people will fly airplanes into buildings, or massacre civilians, is a fool's errand. Back to the link posted above:

The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not blowback or the uncontrollable reflex of a knee being jerked in response to our foreign policy. It is not a reaction that can be soothed by applying aloe and appeasement, but an aggressive action intended to expand their power and influence. That refusal to see Muslims as actors rather than reactors is rooted in a colonialist view of Third World peoples as the balls in our pinball foreign policy machine, rather than civilizations looking to step into a power vacuum that we have left open for them...

If Muslims only hated us, then we could live with that. But like Japan on December 1941, they do not just hate us in the abstract fashion that countries and peoples hate one another. We are not just hated. We are in their way.

That is all we need to remember and all we need to focus on, and it should form the basis for how we respond.