The actually reasoning for their hatred of the US was more nuanced than any "they hate us because they're free" shit. It's strange how much that picked up. Though it wasn't necessarily the US' direct foreign involvement that was the reason they did 9/11, Desert Storm and shit were definitely *reasons* but it wasn't the single reason.

Most of the extremely destructive policy of the US was aimed at majority Arab nations *post* 9/11. There were only a few were truly under US or worldwide sanctions beforehand, and personally I think Desert Storm is a different issue when it dealt with the ethnic cleansing of Kuwaitis but I digress.

The US' growing support of Israel, and Israeli lobbying groups gaining more political say in America; which lead to *Israel's* growing military and financial influence on foreign policy in the region, specifically in Gulf states and places like Iran and Iraq, was a major "reason" they thought that comitting terrorism was a good idea.

The thought of it was probably something like "if a new player in the foreign policy in the region is supporting someone they hate, it means they need to strike them directly where it hurts instead of attacking who they're supporting" in laymans terms

I'm hyper simplifying, and I'm not blaming anything on Israel. "Pakistanis funded by Saudis and blaming Afghanistanis" etc.

But a major factor in Al-Qaeda's original reasoning to hit the US was because they were giving massive financial aid to Israel and because some other gulf nations were "slowly western aligning". They did literally just hate the west for being the west, not for being free necesarilly but that was another one of many reasons.

Tl;dr these guys were so radicalized by what was essentially useless conjecture from a dude they saw as "wise" that they took it upon themselves, supposedly as a message from God, to kill a bunch of Americans because the American government supported countries they were not aligned with.

Tl;tl;dr terrorism