Significant+Passage+Page

Passage from //Hegemony or Survival://   “The specific policies that inflamed the potential ‘support base’ from Islamic terrorism were Israel-Palestine and the murderous US-UK sanctions regime in Iraq. But long before, there were more fundamental issues. Again, it makes little sense to ignore these, at least for those who hope to reduce likelihood of further terrorist crimes or to answer George W. Bush’s plaintive question, ‘why do they hate us?’   The question is wrongly put: they do not hate //us,// but rather the policies of our government, something quite different. If the question is properly formulated, then the answer is not hard to find. In the critical year 1958, President Eisenhower and his staff discussed what he called the ‘campaign of hatred against us’ in the Arab world, ‘not by the government but by the people.’ The basic reason, the National Security Council advised, was the perception that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments and is ‘opposing political or economic progress’ in order ‘to protect its interest in Near East Oil.’”   -Hegemony or Survival. Chapter 8, Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms.    I have chosen these two paragraphs as my significant passage for a few reasons. One is that it is a passage that allows a reader to easily understand what he is saying, and to get a good idea of what the book is about. In chapter 8, Chomsky develops on the ideas of terrorism and foreign policies. Obviously with this quote, he is talking about an over generalization of how terrorists “hate us” when the case is, as he says, they hate “the policies of our government.” Also, later in the chapter, soon after this passage, he writes about our presence in the Middle East for oil, rather than for the war on terror. So this passage touches on a lot of the ideas that Chomsky writes about in this book.

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