It's not ignorance, Irishman. It's a complicated issue. I think it falls into 3 main issues: 1) Part of the problem is our nation's wealth. We're the wealthiest country on earth and, proportionally, we don't share that wealth with other countries. 2) Another factor is that we are an educated people and we are free to pursue whatever we want to in this country. 3) The last is our freedom. Despite the complaining we all do about our country from time to time, we enjoy a great many freedoms in this country. I know that I certainly am guilty at times of taking those freedoms for granted. We don't have to live day-to-day with tanks, fighter planes, and machine gun fire going on in our neighborhoods. We don't have 10 year old boys being forcefully taken to go fight in a war.

Many of these people are poorer than we can ever imagine, impoverished into an existence where there is no freedom, no opportunity and no hope. That's why I think the fundamentalists are so easily influenced because ANYTHING (including becoming a suicide bomber so their family can get money) is better than the existence they endure. Not that I can sympathize for 1 second the notion of anyone becoming a suicide bomber who targets innocent people.

Then throw in the fact that they have very filtered and heavily censored media and they're fed constant misinformation about us. They hear al Jezeera (or however it's spelled) saying the "US are occupiers - just look at what the US is doing to Iraq." They don't have the choice to get alternative viewpoints than what their government rams down the citizen's throats. Couple that with many, many illiterate people and you get what we have today in the Mid East and in other parts of the world.