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Notes -
I don't think it's possible to know that Hamas's self-promotions using videos directly showing their terrorism in action had a net positive or negative effect for their support in the West, but I think it's at least clear that it didn't cause some major backlash. Which is still interesting in itself.
As someone who had a similar mentality on September 12, 2001, I think there's some truth to the "blank slate" explanation. The thinking was immediately, "How badly did Osama Bin Laden and his Musli compatriots be abused by the American empire that they felt helpless to do anything but to hijack planes and murder thousands of people? The depths of evil to which these people were pushed to do shows just how evil America is to the rest of the world, and perhaps those individuals who were murdered didn't deserve it, but America as a whole clearly deserved what happened yesterday." I see something similar happening with the narrative here.
But I don't think it's right to call it "blank slate," because that implies some sort of genetic explanation. I don't think it's a matter of genetics, but of religion. What I think I was missing as a teenager back then was the religious context and the understanding that many people take their religion VERY seriously, in a way that's almost beyond comprehension for someone like me who was raised atheist in a secular environment. That plus cultural relativism makes it easy to characterize anyone as a freedom fighter.
I'm also wondering what it would have been like if 9/11 happened in this era of smartphones and cheap Internet on planes. What if Al Qaeda livestreamed the events, including in-cockpit views of the planes all the way to the moments of the crashes? And passengers too would have livestreamed so many streams with different angles and such. It would also include the whole "Let's roll" incident that I believe led to the crash of one of the planes before it could hit a Washington DC target. I could see these being morale boosters both for the doves and the hawks immediately following the attacks, and I'm not sure what direction things would've changed, if at all.
I didn't mean to imply a genetic explanation. It's clearly about religion. What I meant by blank slate is that if the sympathizer assumes that the average Gazan is blank of bigotry, in that case they aren't taking the antisemitism into account in the equation. If you simply assume that the Muslims that surround Israel aren't opposed to Jewry on a general basis, that their grievances with Israel are purely political, then it's a lot more reasonable to side with them. As you say, they may be missing that understanding of the depth and seriousness in which Muslims take their religion.
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