quadtard wrote:
Direct their own peoples attention away from the problems at hand: Opression in their home countries.
That's certainly true at a national level. I would even go so far as to say that nothing would be as totally destructive to world peace as a fair and permanent settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians - not only would it cause every Arab government to fall within a decade, it would also cause serious problems should Israel lose pariah status and attempt to join the EU.
But that doesn't explain why individual Arabs, who have no love for either their governments or Islamic fundamentalists, still think that Israel is in the wrong.
There was a really good segment of "Saddam's Bombmaker", a book about a nuclear scientist in the employ of the late dictator. At his behest, he meets with a representative from the PLO, and after refusing to work with him several times, he wrote,
"Finally, I decided to gamble with the truth. 'Like any good Arab, I support the cause of Palestinian liberation. I believe it is just. However, what I see is that you, the PLO, have no real strategy. You talk like you are fighting on all fronts, on all levels, with the entire world behind you,' [the author] said, gesticulating with both hands. 'But really, you mostly just kill women and children.' I looked at the PLO man. He stared back. I had no idea what he would do. This was a man who could have me killed. Finally, he simply shrugged and said, 'OK.'"
The point is, this man, with no love for Islamic extremism nor Saddam, who isn't an anti-Semite either, strongly believes that the Israelis are in the wrong, and he justifies this through other experiences in his book. This isn't politics at work, it's something people believe for a reason.
