I have little doubt this partially explains why Tom Fox’s fellow Christian Peacekeepers, all Canadian, are still alive:

Passport saved Canadian hostage

Mark Budzanowski could almost feel his captors’ mood sag when they rifled through his pockets and found his passport. The word ’Canada’ on the cover was a blow to the dozens of masked men who surrounded him in the nondescript basement somewhere in the Gaza Strip. They thought they had kidnapped an American.

At first, the men in the masks didn’t believe their eyes, and questioned the 57-year-old aid worker about Canada and about specific shops near Mr. Budzanowski’s residence on Carlton Street in Toronto.

When they were finally convinced that Mr. Budzanowski was not an American in disguise, he said, they started treating him more politely, and handling him less roughly.

“When they were certain I was Canadian, they were very disappointed. Then, they told me, ’We love Canada.’ That’s wonderful to hear when you have guns pointed at you,” an exhausted Mr. Budzanowski said yesterday in a telephone interview shortly after he was released after almost 30 hours as a hostage.

“It’s wonderful to have a Canadian passport because it changes people’s minds. One of the guards kept asking me to say hello to Canada, so it does stand for something.”

His former captors had taken a liking to him toward the end of the hostage-taking and one — the one who kept asking him to say hello to Canada — even gave him a phone number to call if he ever needed the help of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Paul William Roberts described similar experiences as a Canadian journalist covering the US attack on Irag in his indispensable A War Against Truth. Unfortunately, as a few of the comments to the Globe and Mail article demonstrate, some assumptions retain a theological grip on the the Western public mind, and one (thanks, Bernard Lewis) is that the Muslim world hates the West and modernity in general, and our freedoms in particular. While their methods are often hideously immoral, the Arab world’s confrontation is not with the West, but with the West’s policies, in particular those of the United States. And in many cases, those policies are just as immoral.

Sometimes I try to imagine a foreign power setting up military bases in the United States, helping displace many of its inhabitants and dictating how and where its natural resources will be disposed of (I’m sure it would be less of a stretch if I were Native American). Then I try imagining the reaction of Americans to being told their resentment is really towards their conquerors’ superior cultural values. At this point, I usually find myself looking for a rocket launcher.