I feel even more sorry for the wild delusions that Disappointed suffers from. Where does he get his facts?

He quotes Robert Fisk, an anti-US demagogue who obviously has an axe to grind. Fisk hardly makes his case in the US and has recently compromised his stand by whitewashing Saddam Hussein's use of human shields and other practices that contravene the Geneva Convention. Hardly a stellar source of balanced reporting, I must say.

The writer goes so far as to give credence to Osama bin Laden's early disclaimer about his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This disclaimer was later cast aside by al-Qaeda operatives themselves when they provided intimate details o­n the attack itself.

The fact that radical Islamists everywhere celebrated the attack and hailed Osama (who took no steps to repudiate the 'honour') as a hero leaves no doubt in the minds of western and Muslim governments as to who the culprit was.

The remark that US President George W Bush was "at a loss to account" for the attack ignores the fact that all US intelligence agencies zeroed in o­n al-Qaeda as the responsible party o­n the very same day of 9/11. What staggered the US government and public was the savagery of the attack o­n an unsuspecting populace that was not at war.

The writer embellished an imaginary story that the Taliban was o­nce a US ally. The fact is the Taliban was never involved in the fight between 1979-1989 against the Soviets because this organisation was the product of the Pakistani intelligence and the madrasah in the mid-1990s.

The Taliban swept into power in Afghanistan in the late 1990s backed by Pakistani paramilitary and security agencies to establish a regime that was friendly towards Islamabad. It is twisted logic to declare that the adversarial relationship between the Taliban and the US benefited the Bush administration when the whole 9/11 attack was a direct result of the co-operation and collusion between the former and al-Qaeda.

Even the often-mentioned mantra that "Osama was o­nce a US-protg" ignores the fundamental relationship between US special forces and the Afghan Mujahideen where the US provided consultancy to those guerillas specifically to topple the Soviet-installed regime in Kabul in a Cold War setting. They were o­nly returning the favour that the Soviets did for them by aiding the Vietcong during the Vietnam War.

I get even more lost by Disappointed's reasoning as he gets into the discussion that a lot of anti-western terrorists actually hail from countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Far from providing compelling evidence of US perfidy, it o­nly goes to underline that it is time for Arab governments to stop playing these two-faced roles in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism and anti-US sentiments.

If you get to the bottom of the grouses, most of these radical Islamists (including the o­nes in Malaysia) have a hard time dealing with their own governments and the global economy. They maintain a false ideal of a medieval brand of Islam and attract followers because of the deep grievances that exist in those societies that have very little to do with the US or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The governments in these Arab and Muslim countries need to address the basic inequalities in their own societies instead of secretly co-operating with the West while allowing rampant distortion of facts (as seen in the Arab reporting of the current war o­n Iraq) to inflame their population against outside western governments.

Disappointed actually provides instances that support the suspicion that many in the US have about Arab governments, moderate or otherwise, who support subversive groups in university campuses and mosques that exhort Muslim converts to become so-called 'jihad' warriors.

People who become apologists for radical Islamists and tyrants like Saddam need to face up to the reality that more Muslims have suffered and died at the hands of their own rulers than from non-Muslims.

The reality remains that very few Arab or Muslim societies in this world can show progressive achievement in the fields of economics, science and technology or the arts because of their constant repression of their own peoples.

In short, they need to do some really deep soul-searching instead of looking for external conspiracies behind every failure in the Muslim world.