What is "meddling in local affairs" in this context?

Overthrowing Muslim governments (including democratically elected governments), massive military, logistical, and even direct participation in Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, invading and occupying various countries, etc. No, I don't believe US pop culture is a major reason they attack the US.

I think its pretty clear in this case that the root of Al Qaeda's hate of America has nothing to do with America's freedom. There are many countries which are just as free--if not more so--than the US. (Has Al Qaeda ever bothered to condemn Japan?) No doubt they disapprove of many aspects of the American lifestyle, but mostly they are interested in signalling to their fellow Muslims the purity of their opposition to US power in the middle east. Attacking a shared common enemy is a tactic for increasing support for Al Qaeda throughout the Muslim world. The root cause of the Anti-American sentiment is the very real history of US aggression and meddling in local affairs.

Likewise, when US politicians condemn rival countries for human-rights violations, you can be sure that they don't actually care about human rights. Hence they frequently condemn Russia, Syria, and Iran while being close allies with countries that are much less democratic and much more oppressive (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain.)

Can you simply not conceive of people having a religious motivation for war?

I used to identify very strongly with right-wing Christianity. I can conceive of religious motivations for just about anything because I used to possess them myself. Name your favorite country and I can still crack open a Bible and make a theological case for starting a crusade. Deus vult!

The point I've been trying to make is that the causes that drive a nation to actually commit to a war are almost always the mundane political ones, while religion is used to drum up support and provide legitimacy to the cause.

You have modeled other people so that what they say they believe, and say that their motivations are, are not their beliefs and motivations, which you think you have accurately identified.

It may just be my own cynicism. When I see people giving all kinds of arguments about rights and morals in support of actions that coincidentally increase their personal wealth or power, I do question their motives. Quote Matthew 19:21 to a wealthy religious person sometime and the reaction will either be anger or an explanation of what Jesus really meant. By far the least common reaction is to actually renounce worldly possessions.

But those are the leaders. Followers of cults or extremist groups generally feel some cocktail of insecurity, depression, and maladjustment in their personal lives and come to like the sense of community offered. If they spend long enough in the group they will internalize the rhetoric and eventually escalate their beliefs to the point where they are willing to perpetrate violence in their name. Their scope, however, is often limited. You don't see any such organizations muster enough power to wage war unless there's enough animosity to swell the ranks or they can find a patron who uses their rhetoric for his own purposes.

But why would religious propaganda work on people whose true motivations are political?

Religion is strongly tied to community and culture. Even level-headed believers can get defensive when they feel their faith is attacked. It's an appeal to emotion and group dynamics that is common to every sort of demagoguery.

Religious propaganda is there to drum up support, but there already has to be some animosity towards the object in question. Let's take rock and roll. We've all heard the allegations that it's satanic, immoral, etc. The thing is, plenty of people were already averse to it because they didn't like it and objected to their children listening to "black" music. In a word, they wanted to hear about how bad it was. It's a running theme that disagreeable things are branded immoral or heretical. It reinforces prior perceptions and makes those things anathema to the group.

If you have a grievance against a group, rumors inevitably pop up. We like to believe them, even if they're ridiculous, because they reinforce our view that the group is evil. Start telling stories about their immoral sexual practices, child sacrifice, and devil worship and you can fan the religious flames. They're not just jerks, but abominations keen on uprooting everything your group holds dear. Game, set, match.

This is all said long before Hitler was even a lunatic fringe candidate, though I repeat myself.

Hitler said a lot of things long before he became a candidate. He loved to talk.

Was Hitler always obsessed with race and Jew-hatred? Yep. Did his actions seem in accord with this? Amazingly so.

Not amazingly so. The Jewish problem was a back-burner issue which was pursued with minor energy and in a variety of ways like allowing emigration and planning expulsion to Madagascar compared to much bigger issues like re-arming Germany, reducing unemployment, preparing for war with America & USSR, etc. Read through something like Wage of Destruction or Savage Continent, and one does not get the impression at all that killing Jews was Hitler's top priority, or even fifth top priority. You keep stating this and I'm not seeing it. There's only a straight line from parts of Mein Kampf to Dachau when you ignore everything else.

???

Are you talking about the invasion plans? The original estimate was was for the Red Army to fold in a few weeks. Do you have any references for your claim that the Germans planned for a "Russia proper" push to happen in winter of 1941-42?

why did Hitler insist on breaking the pact and invading Russian in winter?

Nitpick: Hitler invaded Russia in the middle of summer.

The answer is that he regarded Communism as "Judeo-Bolshevism", a Jewish plot against the Aryan race.

That answer has problems explaining the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Hitler invaded on June 22, was planning to be done before the frost set in, and was (I think correctly) worried about Stalin's double cross at some point down the line.

A German invasion backed by a less insane ideology would have won as well, I think.

there is an explicit call for genocide laid out in a book called Mein Kampf, as well as an explicit racial theory that holds that Aryans are becoming polluted through interbreeding - that unless drastic action is taken, the Aryan will vanish from the world.

Hitler says a lot of things in Mein Kampf, why single that out? He also says a lot of things in its sequel. Politicians say a lot of things they don't mean, much like political parties say a lot of things they have no real interest in in their platforms. And your model predicts he would want to kill all races, not Jews in particular. If your best evidence is 'Hitler talked about killing Jews', then I'm not convinced that it was the ultimate overriding goal of Hitler, and I find the detailed accounts in his other writings and works like Wages of Destruction much more convincing that he was more concerned with defeating America & the USSR than he was with the Jewish problem.

Take that last point about neo-Nazis, it is exactly like what Orwell said, that there are people who do not understand that others can be motivated by racial frenzy.

Hate groups have been an object of interest to law enforcement and psychologists for some years now. Most members are socially maladjusted and have trouble dealing with their insecurities. The "racial frenzy" arises from group dynamics. It provides group cohesion and gives the members a shared sense of purpose. It may motivate the group action, but it's not what drew people to the group to begin with.

Here's one model of hate groups.

I did read Orwell's essay. He makes an excellent point about intellectuals failing to properly understand the powerful emotions that can motivate a group to unified action. I won't contest the role of group identity and group dynamics. What I wish to examine are the motivations that lead people to associate with hate groups or terrorist networks in the first place.

Similarly you say that when bin Laden condemns American decadence or depravity from an Islamic perspective, that's just propaganda to advance a political cause. What if it is the other way around? What if bin Laden instead invokes political grievances to advance a religious agenda? You assume that it cant possibly be that, but: Look at that document again - bin Laden goes into the usual rap against America and the West, but what he asks for is submission to Islam, to Shariah. His aim is, in his own words, explicitly theocratic.

Bin Laden himself may or may not have theocratic aims. My point was that without the political grievances, he just becomes some fanatic spouting rhetoric. With political grievances, he has supporters and recruits.

You call this description of bin Laden's motives "superficial". Why? Because it isn't one that is morally intelligible to you. But why should that mean that those motives are wrong? Isn't it the exact opposite of superficial to think that people are capable of radically differing, and that not everyone is alike?

I call it superficial because it just so happens to align perfectly with our own interests. It demonizes the enemy and provides a casus belli. What it fails to do is answer the question of why radical Islam has become so popular in recent decades.

Take the obvious parallel of Hitler. Yes, you can point to the role of inflation, mass unemployment etc. as allowing his rise. But you cannot draw a line from those to the genocide of the Jews. Even if you ditch morality, a global conflict and the mass extermination of one of your most productive minorities is lousy business sense. The whole thing is completely inexplicable unless you turn it around. The aim was, always, the genocide of the Jews and global conflict, and the problems of Germany allowed Hitler a chance to implement that program. So it is with bin Laden.

Claiming Hitler's end goal was solely the extermination of the Jews clashes very badly with many things I know about Nazi Germany, such as the Madagascar plans and details of Jewish emigration (as covered in The Wages of Destruction, most recently). Can you provide any cites of reputable historians who believe that killing Jews qua Jews was the sum total of Hitler's end-ambitions rather than a side-goal on the way to a world German empire or other goals?