September 11 ended that chapter of her life.

In a letter to her friends and former professors, she writes, "My youth is over; my innocence has ended." Like so many Americans, she describes a traumatic wound, a certainty that she will never again enjoy a sense of security.

"Why did this happen?"

In the first days after the attacks, many people felt too shocked and overwhelmed to ask this question. Now, along with millions of other Americans, this young woman wants to understand the enemy who committed the most audacious terrorist acts in our nation's history.

What are the origins of such intense hatred against our country? Can history help us comprehend terrorists who are willing to die as they kill innocent civilians?

To ask such questions is not unpatriotic. Nor do historical explanations absolve those who have committed these heinous crimes. Whether or not history can help us heal, it can offer us the perspective and wisdom we need to fight this unprecedented threat.

Arab and Islamic hatred of the West is hardly new. Some historians locate its origins during the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, when the Crusades effectively wrested the Holy Land from the Muslims.

In the 20th century, antipathy toward the West only deepened. Each war resulted in consequences that intensified hatred toward the West.

After World War I, for example, European colonial powers carved up the Ottoman Empire into arbitrary states and hand-picked leaders who owed their political power and wealth to the British and French. The result was a dramatic rise in secular Arab nationalism.

The end of World War II, during which the Nazis had tried to annihilate the entire European Jewish population, helped establish the state of Israel -- right in the heart of a hostile Arab Middle East.

The Cold War, for its part, helped ignite the growth of a new Islamic fundamentalist movement. As the United States and the Soviet Union divided the world into separate spheres of influence, Islamic dissidents increasingly viewed both superpowers as godless, soulless empires.

American support of wealthy, corrupt royal families in the Middle East outraged many Arabs and Muslims who contrasted the poverty of their own people with the extreme wealth flaunted by their leaders. By the 1970s, a new Islamic fundamentalism began to challenge U.S.-backed Middle Eastern leaders who had protected American access to oil.

The Iranian revolution catapulted Ayatollah Khomeini to international prominence and cast the United States as "the Great Satan." Soon afterward, an Egyptian writer, Abd al-Salem Faraj, wrote "The Neglected Duty,"a manifesto that called for a holy war to restore Muslim dignity.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, 35,000 idealistic Islamic men from all over the world rushed to defend that Central Asian country. Many of these young men, supported and trained by the CIA, learned the art of warfare as they waged a jihad against Soviet troops.

Unexpectedly, the war transformed a generation of fundamentalist idealists into a disciplined network of terrorists. "It was the Woodstock of the jihad generation,"says ex-CIA agent Milt Bearden. Unlike earlier Arab nationalists, these religious fundamentalists embraced a deeply reactionary, anti-modernist, view of the world. Among them was Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi family.

After they defeated the Soviet Union, these hardened fighters then turned their attention to the other perceived infidel, America. The 1991 Persian Gulf War fanned their growing hatred of the United States when the Saudi royal family allowed Americans to attack Iraq from Saudi soil. After the war, some 7, 000 U.S. soldiers remained in Saudi Arabia, which, in bin Laden's view, desecrated Islam's most sacred sites -- Mecca and Medina -- and justified a holy war against America.

And then there is Israel. For half a century, the United States has steadfastly championed this tiny nation that emerged from the jaws of the Nazi Holocaust. But American support of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, as well as its expanding settlements, has intensified Arab and Islamic sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Nearly every night, Arabs and Muslims watch televised broadcasts of Israeli helicopters, missiles and bullets killing Palestinian civilians. These weapons, they protest, are purchased with the annual $3 billion aid provided by the United States.

Which brings us to the painful present. For the last decade, bin Laden's network has waged a relentless war against the United States -- bombing our embassies and training thousands of terrorists in camps scattered throughout Afghanistan. U.S. bombing of Iraq, the Sudan and Afghanistan -- all Muslin populations -- has only justified their jihad against America.

Terrorism cannot be tolerated or excused in any way. The United States must identify and eliminate the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Still, understanding the historical sources of Arab and Islamic resentment may help us address the poverty and human misery that fuel fanaticism and acts of desperation.

But how do we fight terrorism without creating new terrorists?

That, alas, is the question of the day.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

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