It’s fair to say that the United States doesn’t get heaps of sympathy, 10 years after 9/11, here in the Gulf.

A significant number of people in this region apparently don’t believe the terror attacks on the World Trade Center actually happened. (Rather like an alarming number of Americans.) And then there were those who applauded the event; Osama bin Laden, architect of the attack, was a Saudi, after all, and his worldview was not unique to him.

Too, 17 of the 19 hijackers came from this neck of the woods: 15 Saudis and two Emiratis. The other two were from Lebanon and Egypt.

A UAE citizen, Marwan Al Shehhi, from the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, apparently was at the controls of one of the hijacked planes, United Airlines flight 175, the plane which struck the South Tower. Al Shehhi is a common family name in the UAE; one of the better soccer players in the country is from the Al Shehhi clan.

To be sure, the UAE officially is a dependable ally of the United States, and we have never felt unsafe here nor singled out for being Americans.

Our newspaper, The National, covered the 9/11 10-year anniversary fairly thoroughly, including 15 pages of dense coverage in the weekly “Review” section back on Friday.  (This is an op-ed style section of the sort that many major U.S. newspapers once had.)

The reality here is that even those who are generally sympathetic to the Twin Towers going down and 3,000 people dying … figure it was a long time ago.

Further, they are likely to dwell more on the U.S. reaction to 9/11, which included an invasion of Iraq and a war in Afghanistan, both of which led to endemic instability in those two countries and far more than 3,000 lives lost. The working number for civilians killed in Iraq since the U.S. intervention in 2003 is 100,000.

Several of the pieces in The National’s Review section, including this one under the print-edition headline “Matrix of fear”, focus almost entirely on the 9/11 aftermath, and not in a flattering way to the U.S.

(Though another, entitled “Down the rabbit hole” and written by an American who recently left The National for the Wall Street Journal, focuses on how he was part of a team that knocked down the looniest of conspiracy theories for the magazine Popular Mechanics.)

The paper also ran a very straightforward, U.S.-oriented news story (from the ceremonies in New York) for the editions of Monday a.m.

In terms of other countries in the region … just across the Gulf from us is Iran, which spends very little energy commiserating with the U.S. on any topic, and east of Iran is Pakistan, which might be the most relentlessly anti-American country on the planet, at the moment. The UAE is home to around 1.5 million Pakistanis these days, by the way.

Our take from the other side of the world was that our home country perhaps wallowed in the anniversary a bit much, from the long and emotional event at Ground Zero to the pre-game ceremonies with monster American flags before most NFL games.

My own recollection of the event? I had recently returned from a summer working at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and I was wakened on the couch at maybe 6 a.m. (PDT) after the first plane struck the North Tower. I was watching when the second plane hit. I remember feeling almost nauseated. It seems common for people watching awful events to say later, “It didn’t seem real; it seemed like a movie.” Didn’t work that way for me. I was quite sure it was real, and it impacted me on a visceral level, and instantly.

Without question, that was a day of infamy, as was the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And Americans are allowed to grieve.

It never hurts, though, to try to back up a little and remember that bad, inexplicable and shocking things happen to people who aren’t Americans. And in much of the world, lots of people believe that bad things happen because of Americans.

On the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, we had no trouble picking up on that message.