The U.S. military is training Saudi Arabian pilots here in States, who later leave to slaughter Yemeni civilians thousands of miles away. Unfortunately, some of that violence was turned against us, when a Saudi trainee killed three American sailors at Pensacola Air Station on December 6.

In fact, a half dozen Saudis were arrested in the incident. Three of them apparently filmed the murders, presumably to post online. Yet afterward President Donald Trump spent more time justifying the Saudi royals than supporting the victims’ families.

Every time a terrorist commits murder and mayhem, Americans ask why? U.S. officials usually insist that it is because we are so “good.” If only.

Why terrorists kill should not be a mystery since they themselves tell us why. And none of them has said it is because the U.S. has the First Amendment, holds democratic elections, or leads the world in charitable giving.

Consider Mohammed Saeed al-Shamrani, the Saudi pilot-in-training at Pensacola. On Twitter he declared: “I’m against evil, and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil.”…

Almost a decade ago Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen, attempted to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square. Thankfully, he failed to set the timer properly. Then he waited two days to flee the country, giving authorities the time to identify and arrest him.

Ajani Marwat, the intelligence officer with the New York Police Department who investigated Shahzad, explained: “It’s simple. It’s American policies in his country. That’s it. Americans are so closed-minded. They have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. And he did know. Every time you turn on al-Jazeera, they show our people being killed.” A terrorist organizer in Pakistan told Marwat: “We don’t have to do anything to attract them. The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live [here], the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us.”

At his September 2010 sentencing Shahzad declared himself to be “part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations. I’m avenging the attacks because the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.” He vowed that “until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S.”

Federal  judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum made the obvious point that he targeted civilians. Shahzad responded that in a democracy it was civilians who “select the government.” How about children, asked Cedarbaum? Shahzad answered: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.” …

Polls found that large majorities of Arabs and Muslims shared these criticisms of U.S. policy despite expressing admiration for American values and products. University of Chicago’s Robert A. Pape found that terrorists almost always confronted foreign occupation. After studying more than 2,100 suicide attacks, he concluded that “overall, foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5 percent—and the deployment of American combat forces for 92 percent—of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world” between 2004 and 2009. The solution? Said Pape: “By ending the perception that the United States and its allies are occupiers, we can cut the fuse to the suicide terrorism threat.”

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