The question itself -- 'Why do they hate the West' --is the wrong question, and inevitably encourages the wrong answers.
The correct question is: 'Why do they hate the rest?' Anytime anyone, anywhere, talks about 'why they hate America' or 'why they hate the West' they have already, unwittingly, conceded much of the case.
But like the Ptolemaic (geocentric) theory, that could not account for the data or have predictive value as did the Copernican (heliocentric), those who keep focusing only on 'the West' will not be able to arrive at the correct conclusion.
Again and again it must be pointed out that the greatest victims of Islam have been Hindus, with some 60-70 million killed, and tens of thousands of temples destroyed. The Greco-Buddhist civilization of Afghanistan was largely destroyed by Muslim invaders. The Hindus and Buddhists who once inhabited the East Indies have been steadily reduced, under constant Muslim pressure, as a percentage of the population. The attacks all over Asia, and all over Africa, of Muslims against Christians (not only the Sudan, but the Jihad, with Egyptian pilots strafing Ibo villages, that was the war to suppress Biafra) and animists, need to be constantly recalled.
Not the 'War Against the West.'
But 'War Against the Rest' -- all the Rest.
If Israel was, in the last half-century, the Infidel victim that received the most media attention, this was only because the tiny Infidel state of Israel is located right in the Middle East. Similarly, the Christians of Lebanon, though they did not possess a state of their own, have been targets, especially the Maronites of Lebanon.
If America has been the main target, it is not because of American foreign policy but because America is the most powerful, and most unyielding, and must unsusceptible (chiefly, but not entirely, because it has far more believers in muscular Christianity, not the etiolated pro-"palestinian" kind, and far fewer followers of the Western cult of "tolerance" that the Dutch, to their own great surprise and sorrow, have suddenly and still confusedly realized leaves much to be desired, and is no substitute for knowledge of the enemy).What Do Women Want? is a title with which we are familiar.
What Do Muslims Want?
That is a title that needs a book to be written under it. Okay, I hereby copyright it, pour tous pays sauf l'U.R.S.S., (which rumor has it no longer exists, so I needn't worry)
Phrase the question wrongly, and hark what silliness follows.
Phrase it correctly -- and you are in, like Flynn.
One of those taking part in the discussion here answered: "They hate us because they think we're corrupt and evil. We have pornography. We have drug use. We have homosexuality."
Is that it? Do the Sudanese blacks, all those Nuer and Dinka tribesmen, spend their time sniffing cocaine or watching Linda Lovelace? Did those 60-70 million Hindus who were killed, or Buddhists, or those devout Christians, singing their hymns, routinely blown up in Pakistan and Indonesia, or those Christian nurses punished in Saudi Arabia for singing Christmas hymns, or those naughty Copts in Egypt, who dare to remain Copts, and ditto with those Maronites in Lebanon -- are these people "hated" and persecuted and murdered by Muslims because they were "corrupt and evil...have pornography...drug use...homosexuality"?
What a failure to comprehend. No, let me put it to you bluntly: the Dinka and Nuer, the Hindus and the Buddhist monks in Thailand, the Christians opening their hymnals in Karachi or Lagos, the Hindu villagers in Kashmir and Pakistan and Bangladesh, are not now, and never were, "corrupt and evil...[with] pornography...drug use...homosexuality."
It is not cocaine and rainbow parties which caused Muslims to persecute and murder non-Muslims everywhere they conquered, and today, even within the countries called "Muslim," to keep the non-Muslims in their place.
It is the fact that they were, they are, Infidels. That's it. Whether we are in our Sunday-go-to-meeting best, or looking like Paris Hilton, looking at Rembrandt, or solemnly examining at the Tate Modern the unmade bed, underpants, tampax, and all the unseemly rest, that recently won a prize as "art."
Infidels. The prim and the libertine, le cru et le cuit, the wise man and the fool. It doesn't matter. Infidels -- that's our original sin. And unless we submit, as dhimmis or as "reverts," we will have hell to pay. Don't think that putting your soul in an upright position will save you, will prevent those Muslims from trying to highjack the civilizational plane you are on -- it won't work.
No, Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Infidel, and all the ships at sea, wherever you are, you can do no right by Islam. Don't even try.