Before I respond to the core of the letter Unthinking Muslim henchmen of Americans , I want to say that if Saladdin Ayub is going to use historic examples, he should use correct ones that actually go towards proving his argument.

In his letter, Saladdin mentioned that the Ottoman Empire fell due to some British-Saudi conspiracy. The truth is simpler than that. The Ottomans saw their downfall in the fact that they backed the wrong side in a world war and lost.

They were an empire on the brink of collapse and their support of the Triple Alliance was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

In the 1990-91 Gulf War, the coalition to oust Saddam from Kuwait was not strictly an Anglo-American one but involved many other countries throughout the Middle East and the World. The war was waged at the behest of the Kuwaitis who had been overrun and the Saudis who knew they were next. It was the West coming to the aid of a Muslim nation.

We must also not forget that during the 2003 Iraq War, some Muslim nations did not allow American forces to use their territory. As a result, there remains the speculation as to whether the refusal of Turkey to allow US troops to cross into Iraq actually prolonged the war at the cost of both Western and Iraqi lives.

And whether it gave the insurgency more time to set up operations which continues to take Iraqi lives till today.

What Saladdin doesn't seem to realise is that the countries of the Middle East are at least as dangerous to each other than the West ever was or will be. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both knew of the danger Iraq posed should it have been allowed to rearm and rebuild its military.

Both these countries also realise the danger Iran will pose once it succeeds in building nuclear weapons. All of the Muslim world should have realised the danger the Taliban posed to the image of Islam and the exporting of their extremism to other countries and terrorist organisations.

The Lebanese are starting to realise the danger that Syria poses to any chance they might have in ever being independent again and not just being a Syrian colony.

The West is not the scariest bully on the block and people like Saladdin have to understand that there are more dangerous elements to address within the 'ummah' itself.

Restore its dignity will first involve dealing with these internal issues rather than looking for an external bogeyman in the form of the West.