They do hate our freedoms. So do the followers of Reverend Falwell, Jesse Helms, David Duke and, unfortunately, the cabal of right-wing ideologues so desperate for power that they disqualified thousands of black voters from the Florida voting rolls before the election to give their man a head start. Islam has no monopoly on enemies of freedom.

There is a certain irony to the observation that our most anti-freedom president should be pursuing a war allegedly in defense of freedom. But our wars are always allegedly in defense of freedom. It's just the words that we use to rally spirit. It's how we see ourselves in the world and it definitely has a rose-colored hue when looked at from in front of the glasses.

I'm mainly interested in the people of the United States learning how the regular Arab in the street views the world a little better. This is not about casting Israel in the role of Czechoslovakia to Arafat as Hitler, as Sharon's metaphor put it. My fantasy is for there to be a website where regular people from all over the world would come and talk with each other to learn from each other. There are machine translation software programs that could enable this to take place. The trouble would be getting Americans to take an interest in finding out how normal people in other countries see the actions of our government and also in getting the word out widely enough that people would make use of it. It's kind of a giant world debating club with universal translations in almost real time. It would be best if it operated under official UN auspices.

We, as Americans who believe in human rights and democracy and freedom and the inherent intelligence and goodness of all humans, have a hypocrisy vulnerability when it comes to some, not all, issues of injustice and unfairness around the world. We don't get enough credit, if any, when we do the right thing for justice in some places and we get heaps of crap for every little injustice we fail to do something about anywhere in the world. We also get even more crap for trying to do the right thing and screwing something up but basically getting it mostly right. This isn't fair either. This is at the root of a lot of right-wing American outrage about criticism for our foreign policies.

The worst offense we commit, as far as I am concerned, is not being willing to tell things like they are. We overthrew a democratically elected parliamentary leader in Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah. We did this for the money. We told ourselves we were doing it to fight the Reds who would deprive our oil companies of their democratic rights to profits from the Gulf, but it really was for the money. We did the same thing to Allende in Chile in 1973, with the same justification. We failed to do it to Castro, but it wasn't for lack of trying. We don't seem to mind doing lots of good business with the democratically odious Red Chinese. Check out where all those cheap American flags we are now flying everywhere are manufactured. They were still Communists when last I checked. We did it to Nicaragua, against the express wishes of our Congress while it was going on!

The sick joke of the whole thing is we regular Americans don't actually see much of that money trickling down to our schools, public transit (roads we got plenty), parks and other civic goods. For all the money our policies have been able to protect and increase, it seems we still have more people in prison and in poverty than any of our equally industrialized allies. What's up with that?