Nuclear Beef

I've heard lots of snide commentary mocking the idea that the very foundation of our pluralistic, secular, democratic society is offensive to those who wage Jihad on us. Surely nobody could hate equal rights for women, or the idea of secular democracy. After all, it's 2004, not 1504!

Someone should tell these Jihadis that.

The Iraqi Rebels Show Me Their Latest Victim: A German In a Pool of Blood

Here in the lawless Sunni Triangle, the mujahideen had been on edge, waiting nervously for US marines to launch a powerful attack in the area in retaliation for the murder of four American security contractors in Fallujah, a hotbed of anti-American resistance west of the Iraqi capital. Even though I was British, and therefore deeply suspect, the mujahideen had agreed to let me live among them in a small town a few miles from Fallujah, giving me a rare insight into their way of life as they braced themselves for American reprisals.
...
When the commander explained the mujahideen's motivation to me, he said that they would fight the coalition, the Iraqi Governing Council - whose members they denounce as collaborators and placemen - and any of Saddam Hussein's supporters.
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"We do not hate the Americans and British, we hate the ideas they have brought here. We will now fight every person who tries to bring those ideas, including the Iraqi Governing Council. "We do not want their capitalism, we do not want communism. We have our own ideas about how we want our country to be run in a Muslim way. We support the Shia leader Muqtada Sadr, not because of his ideas; they are not good or bad. We are supporting him with money, weapons and men because he is against the Americans."

Could it be any more clear that the warriors of Jihad are fundamentally opposed to what most of the West considers modern civilization?

They are will to reap its rewards (for example the AK-47s they are armed with) but are unwilling to pay the price of modernizing (liberalizing) their culture. For an idea of the "Muslim Way" they wish on Iraq, see Afghanistan under the Taliban.

So, yes. They hate freedom. Obviously this is not the sole motivation of every Iraqi upset about the occupation, but it is the motivation of the mujahideen and to deny this is silly.

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens in this book review :

I was very struck recently by seeing Tom Cruise's appalling movie The Last Samurai, where an American adventurer takes the side of feudal and tribal chivalry in Japan, presumably because of its self-annihilating authenticity, but realizes during the course of several destructive massacres that the samurai ethos will not survive in the face of modernity. What is needed, he concludes, is a fusion or synthesis between new weapons and old ideas. It's bad enough that an American, even a Scientologist, could actually desire to see what Japan eventually got -- in the combination of an imperial god-king with a large air force and navy, an evil empire and an absolutely calamitous war. Even more alarming was the cultural myopia that prevented critics and audiences from seeing that precisely this combination of medieval and atavistic ideas with borrowed technology is what threatens Eastern societies no less than our own.