Terror in America - The US arouses in billions of people the same kind of murderous fury that led to the French and Russian revolutions. But this time, it's on TV. By John Lloyd

Asked to comment on the slaughter off Wall Street, Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of the London-based Palestinian weekly al-Quds al-Arabi, dissociated himself from the horror, agreed it might well have been the work of Osama Bin Laden, and then said that, by "putting itself on the side of the Israelis who are massacring the Palestinians", America had made itself into an object of hate throughout the Middle East.

The Palestinians in East Jerusalem dancing with joy suddenly seemed explicable. This is not a state of war, but it is the state of mind of war. This is "Gotcha!", with no second thoughts. This is "give them some of their own medicine" at Dresden, or Nagasaki. We, or our parents or grandparents, have been in this state of mind. This is hate.

It was the recognition, which was impressed on every one of us watching the screen on Tuesday afternoon, that this was the real thing. This was hate, so pure that young men had given their lives for it, condemned themselves to death - not in a moment's ecstasy, but as a deliberate act, planned for months. This was a hate that, though it may have been harboured most bitterly by Osama Bin Laden - the man on top of everyone's most-likely list - nevertheless swims in a very large sea.

Bin Laden learnt to fight at the hands of the Americans in the 1980s. He led the "Arab Afghans" who fought on the side of the Pakistanis and the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who were armed and funded by the CIA. Bin Laden, the son of a multimillionaire Saudi building contractor, built bases for the mujahedin and was paid with American taxpayers' money.

He and his people believed that they had fought the Soviet Union to destruction. In an interview with an AP correspondent in 1998, Bin Laden recalled that, in the mid-1980s, he set up his first camp, "where the volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans and the money by the Saudis. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts, communists or western oppression."

Early the next year, he told Time magazine that "hostility towards America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God". He has issued fatwas - though, having no religious rank, he cannot do so under Muslim law - against Jews and "Crusaders"; the latter synonym for Christians used to remind his followers that they, like Jews, have invaded and occupied Muslim soil.

Bin Laden has occupied the most militant corner of militant Islam, one where glorying God is synonymous with destroying his enemies; where no going to God could be more glorious than self-immolation in the destruction of these enemies. This hate has ripened in him and his group, and has been shared with the Taliban. But it would be a mistake to think he is a freak. The sea in which he swims does not hate like him: but it is prepared to be indifferent, even approving.

What do poor people see when they watch - as most of them do, some time - television? They see, thanks to the colossal success of Hollywood, American television - soaps and game shows and CNN newscasts. But they do not follow the narratives on these shows as we do: they see something else. They are like the Soviet people in the Sixties and Seventies who watched the traditional late-December Soviet news items which focused on poverty on western streets, not to sympathise with the beggars, but to see what was in the windows of the posh shops in the background. Poor people look at rich television for its wealth - for the clothes and the cars, for the consumer goods and the sexy look of the glossy women, and the self-confidence of the sleek men. They love to watch it, and to envy and hate the people who live among it.

Global television and its American content have made America envied for its wealth and hated for its arrogance among billions of people. It has created the conditions for a virtual revolution. The French and the Russian revolutions had revolutionary vanguards; behind them were the masses, not revolutionary as they claimed, but envious enough to be roused to murderous fury when the exploiters were brought down, or passive enough to let it pass, or too scared to object, or too few to prevail.

This is virtual revolution. It happens on television, and the masses see it. It has - unlike the French or Russian revolutions - no utopian scheme for a better world. But like the beliefs that animated many of the masses in these actions, it simply believes that a better world is one with fewer oppressors - in the contemporary case, Jews and Crusaders.

There is nothing that can be done to change the mind or temper of Osama Bin Laden and those like him. But the sea in which he swims can ebb and flow. What most people in the world see are very rich countries in North America, Europe and a few other places, whose populations have wealth, weapons, easy lives, loud voices, self-assurance and an assumed right to tell them how to live their lives better. What their leaders realise is that the institutions which were created by these rich countries to be global - such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - are run by the rich countries that account for about 20-25 per cent of the globe. They can disagree with or even ignore these institutions, but then they will receive no aid. Very often, what these rich states and global institutions tell the poor countries to do for their own good is for their own good, at least materially. But the poor do not come to that realisation themselves - as the rich countries did - through trial and error. They are told it by the west. Their own economic and technical elites, western-educated for the most part, reinforce the point. The leaders who, however they came to power and however much they steal from their people, still want to be seen as ministering to them and guiding them are actually seen - on television - as being pushed around by the rich states, and especially the US.

Global governance, now much discussed, is presently governance by the rich states. It is rather like Britain in the 19th century: there is an electorate, but it is a small, property-holding one. The poor are assumed not to have the wisdom to be trusted with votes proportionate to their numbers. Making governance reflective of these numbers will not stop terrorism. But it may, in time, lower the level of the sea in which it swims. It will give leaders who are presently ambivalent about or quietly hostile to the Pax Americana the glimmer of what could become a Pax Universalia. It could reduce the distance between the masses watching the soaps and newscasts in their meeting halls or eating houses, and the people for whom the programmes were made.

In his book Future Positive, Michael Edwards, who has been concerned with global civil society for over two decades in various guises, writes that we have to tell each other a new story - moral, spiritual, prudential - whose aim is to teach the lesson of mutual reliance. "True freedom is only attainable through relations with others," he writes, "since in an interconnected world I can never be safe until you are secure."

The temptation now, especially in America, is to say of the dread Other who has organised the massacre in Manhattan that I can never be safe until you are dead. But that would be wrong. Manhattan shows us that there is no secure place, be we never so rich and well armed. We need, instead, to make the others secure, and then the dread Other will find the sea ebbing. That is, at any rate, the only rational hope we have.

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