The Washington Post’s Amar Bakshi is traveling around the world with a video camera interviewing “America’s lovers and haters.” Check it out. Interesting stuff there. His latest vlog is with Muslims in Blackburn, England:

The group is skeptical not only about whether Britain and America believe in “genuine democracy” or the selective implementation of it. They are equally skeptical of America’s motivations for entering the Iraq war. It was never to rid the country of Saddam Hussein, remove weapons of mass destruction, or bring democracy to a troubled region, they say. “It was for oil money,” Thair plainly states.

Everybody within this group agreed that 9-11 was a tragedy committed by Osama Bin Laden and that this event was harnessed by “neoconservatives to justify war.” But a few people I met earlier in the day were skeptical about 9-11 itself. A young, clean-shaven car salesman and his lanky friend bantered about the tragedy on the side of the street.

Salam began, “How many murderers are still out there in America [that] still haven’t been named…but within an hour they were saying Osama Bin Laden did it…” Shaheed continued, “Nobody actually believed it was real. I mean, for somebody to organize something like dropping the twin towers, you got to be really, really clever to do something like that…”

“It’s more than Osama Bin Laden could do, you know what I mean?”

“I personally can’t put something like that on a Muslim. Hijacking three or four planes…”

“And why hasn’t it happened again?”

It almost did happen again, Salam. Guess these chaps were snoozing last summer when the massive London airline plot was busted. Guess they snoozed when Richard Reid was convicted for the airline shoe bombing plot in 2002. Why didn’t it “happen again?” Because after 9/11, some people stopped snoozing and woke up to the reality of global jihad.

Unfortunately, not enough have yet.

Another interview with British politics students yielded criticism of American patriotism and the popular display of the American flag, which the students called “very peculiar.”

Gwyneth Paltrow is nodding her head.

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