"Blowback," as it's called, is a controversial thesis, but it does explain why Osama bin Laden goes after America and not, say, Switzerland.This is a favorite rhetorical trope of anti-interventionists: If only we had a neutral foreign policy like Switzerland, terrorism would never have come to our shores. But it's simply not true that Switzerland has never suffered an attack by Middle Eastern terrorists. The Swiss were targeted twice in 1970 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Everyone aboard Swissair Flight 330 was killed by a bomb in the cargo hold . . .
Granted, the PFLP is not quite the same as bin Laden; they are nominally a secular, Marxist organization, albeit one that is allied with Islamists in attacks on Israel. But the attacks on Swissair put paid to the naive notion that we can count on terrorists to leave us alone as long we leave them alone. (emphasis added)
That's tellin' 'em! Peaceful Switzerland was targeted 37 years ago by Marxist terrorists, so American policies basing troops in Saudi Arabia and maintaining an embargo on Iraq reputed to have killed hundreds of thousands have nothing to do with al Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. no matter what Osama bin Laden said about the subject. In fact, now that I think about it, some Swiss guy shot an arrow off of a kid's head a few years back--I bet the Islamofascists had something to do with that too!
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