The Shiites saw themselves as reformers, eradicating Iran of Western influence and civic corruption as embodied by the Shah, but the U.S. did not understand this worldview, and could only see the violence the overthrow of the Shah had caused. Since the Iranian hostage crisis, relations between the U.S. And Islamic-affiliated regimes have steadily deteriorated. Most Islamic fundamentalist nations and groups are committed to the destruction of Israel, and the U.S. is one of Israel's most loyal allies in the region. The attacks upon the World Trade Center are the most obvious, although certainly not the only provoking acts...

soil by groups who claim to speak in the name of Mohammed. The civil war in Lebanon, which was essentially a terrorist or guerrilla struggle between competing religious and ethnic factions, not all of whom were Muslim, further contributed to the common portrait of Islamic radicalism as inevitably associated with terror and violence in the minds of Westerners.
Works Cited

Iran hostage crisis." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. 1994, 2000-2006, on Infoplease. 2000-2007 Pearson Education, publishing as Infoplease.

14 Apr. 2007 http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0825448.html.