You cannot possibly expect even the most illiterate person on Earth to believe that you really want a democracy in Iraq while you are paying Mubarak $3 billion a year to pretend he doesn't hate Israel. And you're providing the military and diplomatic umbrella that protects the fascist government, if you will, of the al Sauds.

I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.

What we face is a scared populace, and because it's scared, it's willing to put up with what I think are inevitably more moves toward the constriction of civil liberties, mobility within the country, the ability to travel overseas, all of those things we have long taken for granted.

If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn't go off.

And so to dismiss these homegrown terrorists as boobs, which is one of the terms that was used in one of the New York newspapers after the Miami raid, is true now, but to bet on that is I think a sure way to lose your bank account.

I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

Our relationship with Israel is another reason we're being attacked. But an American politician - whether Muslim or not - who criticizes Israel as a martyrdom operation in American politics cannot survive as an official or as a politician.