In the bewildering days after Tuesday, I felt anger against the US’s self-righteous proclamations, overlaid with a religious veneer. How would five decades of US atrocities around the world, I asked people, compare to Tuesday’s atrocity? What about a look at the less respectable things America has done over the past 50 years, to see if there are people that might legitimately be aggrieved? Seumas Milne’s comment “They can’t see why they are hated” (September 14) neatly sums up my more jumbled thinking. Marc Johnson, Bergvliet
Of course the US doesn’t get it. Who can understand why faceless cowards would target the Trade Towers when they are sure that people are there, thereby killing thousands of innocent civilians (some of whom were probably South African, certainly a couple of hundred were Brits and Canadians).
Who can possibly understand the hatemongers who, after doing this shocking deed, don’t even claim responsibility, and hide like the cowards they are, depending on the US’s innate sense of law and decency to stay safe in their little pigsties until the coast is clear.
The US will retaliate, make no error about that, but unlike the murderous bad smells that govern some of the terrorist states that harbour these dogs (and are defended by small-minded vacuum-brained anti-American commentators that seem to have taken up position in your newspaper) they will make sure they have the right target before they do. John Valentine, via e-mail
Maybe Americans will now take a troubled leap into the darkness of their collective soul, and in so doing identify with the human pain and suffering in places like the Palestinian refugee camps, or in Baghdad, or in the Third World at large. Maybe now that they are beginning to know first-hand what real suffering is, US citizens will gain compassion for the suffering imposed by US policies on fellow human beings elsewhere in the world. But I doubt it. The media and the military-industrial spin-doctors will see to it that they don’t. S Winer, Johannesburg
To equate American policy with the butchery of Saddam Hussein who massacres his own people with glee, or with the barbarism of the Sudanese slave-sellers, or with the Palestinian perpetrators of racial hatred, is misguided in the best of times and is horribly cruel in a time such as this. People may disagree about the rightness of American policy, but to smirk and sermonise in the wake of my country’s national disaster is despicable.
I would have thought that a country that has struggled so mightily with the aftermath of institutionalised torture and murder would understand the need for compassion and understanding for a country that has suffered more than 5 000 civilian deaths in a single day. Clearly, the need to demonise the US trumps some people’s common decency. Joshua E Friedman, Cambridge, Massachusetts