...and I say this as an American who knows people who lost family in the 9/11 attacks, and has great compassion for them. But exactly the same thought process that blinds Israelis to the huge assemmetry of violence between their own country's military occupation of Palestinian lands, and the number of Israeli victims of suicide bombing and Qassam rockets, occurs in the minds of Americans who mourn 3,000 our "our" dead but don't give a rat's ass about 1 million+ (likely) Iraqi dead since 2003.

This process of inversion is part of the indoctrination that imperialism requires, IMO.