Your response pointed out a flaw in my post that I should clear up.

I said there are many people on this planet who cannot live in the same world with free societies. It would be much more accurate to say that there are totalitarian or authoritarian leaders and governments who think that way.

After all, it is they and their power base that are threatened by freedom, not the people of their own nations that they oppress.

You correctly point out that many ordinary people in these oppressive nations have a much more positive attitude towards free nations than their leadership does. A lot of them flee to them when they can.

You also correctly point out that during the Cold War we allied ourselves with many less than savory governments to keep the Soviet Union at bay. Sometimes this worked. Other times it came back later and bit us. Right or wrong in hindsight, the deal with the Devil that we made back then was that a thug oppressing his nation would eventually die, or could be overthrown in favor of a possible eventual democracy. A communist system, once in place, was forever (or so we thought.) The thug was preferred to letting the communists in.

One of the best parts about the Cold War being over, is that we don't have to do this any more.

I am also willing to concede to ebnelson that the Muslim terrorist issue does have "at least something to do with Israel and Palestine," which is more accurate than my implying that it has nothing at all to do with the hostility of radical Islam towards us. But I still maintain that if Israel were not an issue, they would still be hostile.

Besides, if it was all just about Israel, no Arab nation would have disliked us before 1948, and I don't think that was the case.