Saturday, October 6, 2012

An Open Letter to Obama


Sir
I fail to understand why your country is hell bent on having others hate you. Much of the world acknowledges that you have better governance than them. They admire your material progress. Yet they hate you. And you act like you simply can’t fathom why this is so.
The answer is simple. You may feel your system of governance, your way of life, etc is superior. But that doesn’t mean you go about trying to change others too. Or that others are supposed to ape you. If they don’t, you brand them as villains.
The most obvious example of your differences with the rest of the world, and the reason others hate you, is your foreign policy or rather its hypocrisy. You espouse democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, etc. Yet your country has and continues to support authoritarian regimes, as long as their leaders are friendly towards you. This is fine till those leaders are in power. But when their opponents overthrow them they will turn out to be anti-US. And then you cry democracy and human rights and try to bomb them out of existence. You supported the Shah of Iran but when he was overthrown by Islamists, who were not your friends, you armed Saddam to the teeth as he was fighting a war against them. Then when he was of no further use to the US and turned against another ally of yours, you tacked him and eventually overthrew him citing non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Your current ally is Saudi Arabia where an autocratic regime suppresses its people. The same is the case with Afghanistan-Taliban-Pakistan. The list is too long.
The second problem you face and end up imposing on the world at large is your handling of the Islamic world. Whether deliberately or by chance, your country periodically ends up hurting the sentiments of the ‘ultra-sensitive’ Muslim clergy. I do not rule out deliberate because it is suspected that the US administration is highly influenced by Jewish interests who would never want the rest of the world to be at peace with Islam.  
Sometimes you must risk antagonizing them if it is for a just cause, like say women’s rights. But at other times the provocation has been totally needless. Take for example the recent anti-Muslim movie. I saw the trailer and it is patently blasphemic & so obviously made by a Jew with an intention to incite trouble. And Muslims have reacted predictably. Knowing this how can your country not remove it from the internet?  I know your answer will be that you have freedom of speech in your country and hence you cannot stop people from expressing their views. However, we are not fooled by this. Your government imposes a lot of restrictions on what people can say and what they cannot. There are ways to ask Google to remove it but you don’t want to act. You can jail someone just because a threatening mail was sent to the President of the US from his IP but you can’t act against people out to disturb world peace?
Why am I so concerned? Because everything the US does affects the whole world. India has suffered due to the US’s support for jihadis against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. You have lost only one WTC and make it out to be such a big deal. India has suffered much more than the US.
That is why perhaps one day an atheist like me may also hate the US. Unless your country realizes its folly and makes amends.
Yours sincerely
A world citizen

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