On the corner.

Editor,

A) ... The US overthrew popular governments and installed and supported brutal dictators in the Middle East (and elsewhere around the globe) for most of the 20th century. So antipathy towards the US, and the West as a whole, is understandable.

But the past is the past, and with constructive relations old wounds can heal. The US, despite its accelerating decline at the hands of finance capital and right-wing extremists, still has much to offer, provided it understands the mistake of imperial plunder and looks for new ways to relate to evolving societies in the Middle East and elsewhere.

People in the region know this and are more than willing to engage productively with the USA, but trust is essential, cannot be faked, and can be earned if American efforts really are sincere.

To put a fine point on it: offering Middle Eastern youth the opportunity to toil in apparel, sneaker, or electronics sweat shops for slave wages to enrich a handful of greedy fools in the USA is not going to cut it.

B) ... Idiots who exercise their "freedom of expression" by tapping on computer keyboards half a world away from the Muslim world and getting people killed with their clever obscenities would be far more convincing as far as I am concerned if they took their videos and cartoons and anything else they dream up to poison the well and stood with them on a street corner in Cairo or Beirut or Benghazi to communicate their contempt for Muslim people up close and personal.

Re: "The United States and the Muslim World" (9/20/2012)