Continuing conversation

With Sim's post still ringing in my ears, I offer you this from NRO's Jonah Goldberg. To borrow-from-Sim-who-borrowed-from-Andrew, the moneyquote (as far as I'm concerned):

I don't know how to read the minds of Islamist fanatics, but it seems to me they have all the excuses in the world they'll ever need to hate us. Osama bin Laden says the Crusades are reason enough. When he blew up that train in Spain, he said it was partly out of a desire to avenge the taking of Andalusia-- i.e. Muslim Spain in the 15th century. At some point you need to start saying, "Who cares what makes these people angry?" As Mark Steyn put it beautifully during the whole "blame the Crusades" moment:

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands and arrested 22 British watchkeepers. The following year, they tied them to trees, beheaded them, and burned their bodies in a pit. You won't find that in the Geneva Convention. The Japanese fought a filthy war, but here we are less than 60 years later, and Britain and Japan sit side by side at G-7 meetings. If America is really "paying for" events that occurred seven centuries before the Republic's founding, then that's the Muslim world's problem, not ours.

Precisely. How do you measure this? Can you, really? I mean, does someone saying to you, "I hate you plus 10," mean more than they're simply saying, "I hate you!"...?

The point is, and always has been, that a select number of people hate us. We can quibble about exactly how many they are and what sub-segment and percentage of the Islamic population they represent but that is all a side-show to the main event.

They've taken their hate to the farthest extreme possible, taking up arms and killing. While we ought not go out of our way to exacerbate the problem, I don't think we ought likewise, go out of our way to tip-toe around it all as if we can somehow, magically, shove that big-fat genie back into the teeny-tiny bottle.

As an aside, I ask you a question Sim since I know you're an expert on this topic: Does such a view make me a reductive orientalist?