| I have read much on the issue and i
am convinced that the people who
hate america today also hated
america 20 years ago. obviously
younger generations will learn
their hatred of america from their
parents, teachers and the spiteful
media.
- i posted an interesting article
on the subject below.
the falseness of anti-americanism
pollsters report rising
anti-americanism worldwide. the
united states, they imply,
squandered global sympathy after
the september 11 terrorist attacks
through its arrogant unilateralism.
in truth, there was never any
sympathy to squander.
anti-americanism was already
entrenched in the world's
psyche—a backlash against a
nation that comes bearing modernism
to those who want it but who also
fear and despise it.
by fouad ajami
want to know more?
suggested readings
“america is everywhere,"
italian novelist ignazio silone
once observed. it is in karachi and
paris, in jakarta and brussels. an
idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers
over distant lands. and everywhere
there is also an obligatory
anti-americanism, a cover and an
apology for the spell the united
states casts over distant peoples
and places. in the burning grounds
of the muslim world and on its
periphery, u.s. embassies and their
fate in recent years bear witness
to a duality of the united states
as satan and redeemer. the
embassies targeted by the masters
of terror and by the diehards are
besieged by visa-seekers dreaming
of the golden, seductive country.
if only the crowd in tehran
offering its tired rhythmic chant
"marg bar amrika"
("death to america")
really meant it! it is of visas and
green cards and houses with lawns
and of the glamorous world of los
angeles, far away from the mullahs
and their cultural tyranny, that
the crowd really dreams. the frenzy
with which radical islamists battle
against deportation orders from
u.s. soil— dreading the prospect
of returning to amman and beirut
and cairo— reveals the lie of
anti-americanism that blows through
muslim lands.
the world rails against the united
states, yet embraces its
protection, its gossip, and its
hipness. tune into a talk show on
the stridently anti-american
satellite channel al-jazeera, and
you'll behold a parody of
american ways and techniques
unfolding on the television screen.
that reporter in the flak jacket,
irreverent and cool against the
kabul or baghdad background,
borrows a form perfected in the
country whose sins and follies that
reporter has come to chronicle.
in doha, qatar, sheik yusuf
al-qaradawi, arguably sunni
islam's most influential
cleric, at omar ibn al-khattab
mosque, a short distance away from
the headquarters of the u.s.
central command, delivers a khutba,
a friday sermon. the date is june
13, 2003. the cleric's big
theme of the day is the arrogance
of the united states and the
cruelty of the war it unleashed on
iraq. this cleric, egyptian born,
political to his fingertips, and in
full mastery of his craft and of
the sensibility of his followers,
is particularly agitated in his
sermon. surgery and a period of
recovery have kept him away from
his pulpit for three months, during
which time there has been a big war
in the arab world that toppled
saddam hussein's regime in
iraq with stunning speed and
effectiveness. the united states
was "acting like a god on
earth," al-qaradawi told the
faithful. in iraq, the united
states had appointed itself judge
and jury. the invading power may
have used the language of
liberation and enlightenment, but
this invasion of iraq was a
21st-century version of what had
befallen baghdad in the middle
years of the 13th century, in 1258
to be exact, when baghdad, the city
of learning and culture, was sacked
by the mongols.
the preacher had his themes, but a
great deal of the united states had
gone into the preacher's art:
consider his web site,
qaradawi.net, where the faithful
can click and read his fatwas
(religious edicts)— the arabic
interwoven with html text— about
all matters of modern life, from
living in non-islamic lands to the
permissibility of buying houses on
mortgage to the follies of arab
rulers who have surrendered to u.s.
power. or what about his way with
television? he is a star of the
medium, and al-jazeera carried an
immensely popular program of his.
that art form owes a debt, no
doubt, to the american
"televangelists," as
nothing in the sheik's
traditional education at al azhar
university in cairo prepared him
for this wired, portable religion.
and then there are the
preacher's children: one of
his daughters had made her way to
the university of texas where she
received a master's degree in
biology, a son had earned a ph.d.
from the university of central
florida in orlando, and yet another
son had embarked on that
quintessential american degree, an
mba at the american university in
cairo. al-qaradawi embodies
anti-americanism as the flip side
of americanization.
a new orthodoxy
of late, pollsters have come
bearing news and numbers of
anti-americanism the world over.
the reports are one dimensional and
filled with panic. this past june,
the pew research center for the
people and the press published a
survey of public opinion in 20
countries and the palestinian
territories that indicated a
growing animus toward the united
states. in the same month, the bbc
came forth with a similar survey
that included 10 countries and the
united states. on the surface of
it, anti-americanism is a river
overflowing its banks. in
indonesia, the united states is
deemed more dangerous than al
qaeda. in jordan, russia, south
korea, and brazil, the united
states is thought to be more
dangerous than iran, the
"rogue state" of the
mullahs.
there is no need to go so far away
from home only to count the cats in
zanzibar. these responses to the
united states are neither
surprising nor profound. the
pollsters, and those who have been
brandishing their findings, see in
these results some verdict on the
united states itself— and on the
performance abroad of the bush
presidency— but the findings
could be read as a crude,
admittedly limited, measure of the
foul temper in some unsettled
places. the pollsters have flaunted
spreadsheets to legitimize a
popular legend: it is not americans
that people abroad hate, but the
united states! yet it was americans
who fell to terrorism on september
11, 2001, and it is of americans
and their deeds, and the kind of
social and political order they
maintain, that sordid tales are
told in karachi and athens and
cairo and paris. you can't
profess kindness toward americans
while attributing the darkest of
motives to their homeland.
the pew pollsters ignored greece,
where hatred of the united states
is now a defining feature of
political life. the united states
offended greece by rescuing
bosnians and kosovars. then, the
same greeks who hailed the serbian
conquest of srebrenica in 1995 and
the mass slaughter of the muslims
there were quick to summon up
outrage over the u.s. military
campaign in iraq. in one greek
public opinion survey, americans
were ranked among albanians,
gypsies, and turks as the most
despised peoples.
takis michas, a courageous greek
writer with an eye for his
country's temperament, traces
this new anti-americanism to the
orthodox church itself. a narrative
of virtuous and embattled solitude
and alienation from western
christendom has always been
integral to the greek psyche; a
fusion of church and nation is
natural to the greek worldview. in
the 1990s, the yugoslav wars gave
this sentiment a free run. the
church sanctioned and fed the
belief that the united states was
satan, bent on destroying the
"true faith," michas
explains, and shoring up turkey and
the muslims in the balkans. a
neo-orthodox ideology took hold,
slicing through faith and
simplifying history. where the
balkan churches— be they the
bulgars or the serbs— had been
formed in rebellion against the
hegemony of the greek priesthood,
the new history made a fetish of
the fidelity of greece to its
orthodox "brethren."
greek paramilitary units fought
alongside bosnian serbs as part of
the drina corps under the command
of indicted war criminal gen. ratko
mladic. the greek flag was hoisted
over the ruins of srebenica's
orthodox church when the doomed
city fell. serbian war crimes
elicited no sense of outrage in
greece; quite to the contrary,
sympathy for serbia and the
identification with its war aims
and methods were limitless.
beyond the yugoslav wars, the
neo-orthodox worldview sanctified
the ethnonationalism of greece,
spinning a narrative of hellenic
persecution at the hands of the
united states as the
standard-bearer of the west. greece
is part of nato and of the european
union (eu), but an old schism—
that of eastern orthodoxy's
claim against the latin world—
has greater power and a deeper
resonance. in the banal narrative
of greek anti-americanism, this
animosity emerges from u.s. support
for the junta that reigned over the
country from 1967 to 1974. this
deeper fury enables the aggrieved
to glide over the role the united
states played in the defense and
rehabilitation of greece after
world war ii. furthermore, it
enables them to overlook the
lifeline that migration offered to
untold numbers of greeks who are
among the united states' most
prosperous communities.
greece loves the idea of its
"westernness"— a place
and a culture where the west ends,
and some other alien world (islam)
begins. but the political culture
of religious nationalism has
isolated greece from the wider
currents of western liberalism.
what little modern veneer is used
to dress up greece's
anti-americanism is a pretense. the
malady here is, paradoxically, a
greek variant of what plays out in
the world of islam: a belligerent
political culture sharpening faith
as a political weapon, an
abdication of political
responsibility for one's own
world, and a search for foreign
"devils."
lest they be trumped by their hated
greek rivals, the turks now give
voice to the same anti-americanism.
it is a peculiar sentiment among
the turks, given their pragmatism.
they are not prone to the cluster
of grievances that empower
anti-americanism in france or among
the intelligentsia of the
developing world. in the 1920s,
mustafa kemal ataturk gave turkey a
dream of modernity and self-help by
pointing his country westward,
distancing it from the arab-muslim
lands to its south and east. but
the secular, modernist dream in
turkey has fractured, and oddly,
anti-americanism blows through the
cracks from the arab lands and from
brussels and berlin.
the fury of the turkish protests
against the united states in the
months prior to the war in iraq
exhibited a pathology all its own.
it was, at times, nature imitating
art: the protesters in the streets
burned american flags in the
apparent hope that europeans (real
europeans, that is) would finally
take turkey and the turks into the
fold. the u.s. presence had been
benign in turkish lands, and
americans had been turkey's
staunchest advocates for coveted
membership in the eu. but suddenly
this relationship that served
turkey so well was no longer good
enough. as the "soft"
islamists (there is no such thing,
we ought to understand by now)
revolted against pax americana, the
secularists averted their gaze and
let stand this new
anti-americanism. the pollsters
calling on the turks found a people
in distress, their economy on the
ropes, and their polity in an
unfamiliar world beyond the simple
certainties of kemalism, yet
without new political tools and
compass. no dosage of
anti-americanism, the turks will
soon realize, will take turkey past
the gatekeepers of europe.
we were all americans
the introduction of the pew report
sets the tone for the entire study.
the war in iraq, it
argues,"has widened the rift
between americans and western
europeans" and "further
inflamed the muslim world."
the implications are clear: the
united states was better off before
bush's
"unilateralism." the
united states, in its hubris,
summoned up this anti-americanism.
those are the political usages of
this new survey.
but these sentiments have long
prevailed in jordan, egypt, and
france. during the 1990s, no one
said good things about the united
states in egypt. it was then that
the islamist children of egypt took
to the road, to hamburg and
kandahar, to hatch a horrific
conspiracy against the united
states. and it was in the 1990s,
during the fabled stock market run,
when the prophets of globalization
preached the triumph of the u.s.
economic model over the protected
versions of the market in places
such as france, when
anti-americanism became the
uncontested ideology of french
public life. americans were
barbarous, a threat to french
cuisine and their beloved language.
u.s. pension funds were acquiring
their assets and wall street
speculators were raiding their
savings. the united states
incarcerated far too many people
and executed too many criminals.
all these views thrived during a
decade when americans are now told
they were loved and uncontested on
foreign shores.
much has been made of the sympathy
that the french expressed for the
united states immediately after the
september 11 attacks, as embodied
by the famous editorial of le
monde's publisher jean-marie
colombani, "nous sommes tous
américains" ("we are all
americans"). and much has been
made of the speed with which the
united states presumably squandered
that sympathy in the months that
followed. but even colombani's
column, written on so searing a
day, was not the unalloyed message
of sympathy suggested by the title.
even on that very day, colombani
wrote of the united states reaping
the whirlwind of its
"cynicism"; he recycled
the hackneyed charge that osama bin
laden had been created and nurtured
by u.s. intelligence agencies.
colombani quickly retracted what
little sympathy he had expressed
when, in december of 2001, he was
back with an open letter to
"our american friends"
and soon thereafter with a short
book, tous américains? le monde
après le 11 septembre 2001 (all
americans? the world after
september 11, 2001). by now the
sympathy had drained, and the tone
was one of belligerent judgment and
disapproval. there was nothing to
admire in colombani's united
states, which had run roughshod in
the world and had been indifferent
to the rule of law. colombani
described the u.s. republic as a
fundamentalist christian
enterprise, its magistrates too
deeply attached to the death
penalty, its police cruel to its
black population. a republic of
this sort could not in good
conscience undertake a campaign
against islamism. one can't,
colombani writes, battle the
taliban while trying to introduce
prayers in one's own schools;
one can't strive to reform
saudi arabia while refusing to
teach darwinism in the schools of
the bible belt; and one can't
denounce the demands of the sharia
(islamic law) while refusing to
outlaw the death penalty.
doubtless, he adds, the united
states can't do battle with
the taliban before doing battle
against the bigotry that ravages
the depths of the united states
itself. the united states had not
squandered colombani's
sympathy; he never had that
sympathy in the first place.
colombani was hardly alone in the
french intellectual class in his
enmity toward the united states. on
november 3, 2001, in le monde, the
writer and pundit jean baudrillard
permitted himself a thought of
stunning cynicism. he saw the
perpetrators of september 11 acting
out his own dreams and the dreams
of others like him. he gave those
attacks a sort of universal
warrant: "how we have dreamt
of this event," he wrote,
"how all the world without
exception dreamt of this event, for
no one can avoid dreaming of the
destruction of a power that has
become hegemonic . . . . it is they
who acted, but we who wanted the
deed." casting caution and
false sympathy aside, baudrillard
saw the terrible attacks on the
united states as an "object of
desire." the terrorists had
been able to draw on a "deep
complicity," knowing perfectly
well that they were acting out the
hidden yearnings of others
oppressed by the united
states' order and power. to
him, morality of the u.s. variety
is a sham, and the terrorism
directed against it is a legitimate
response to the inequities of
"globalization."
in his country's intellectual
landscape, baudrillard was no
loner. a struggle had raged
throughout the 1990s, pitting
u.s.-led globalization (with its
low government expenditures, a
"cheap" and merciless
wall street-treasury department
axis keen on greater discipline in
the market, and relatively long
working hours on the part of labor)
against france's protectionist
political economy. the primacy the
united states assigned to liberty
waged a pitched battle against the
french commitment to equity.
to maintain france's sympathy,
and that of le monde, the united
states would have had to turn the
other cheek to the murderers of al
qaeda, spare the taliban, and
engage the muslim world in some
high civilizational dialogue. but
who needs high approval ratings in
marseille? envy of u.s. power, and
of the united states'
universalism, is the ruling passion
of french intellectual life. it is
not "mostly bush" that
turned france against the united
states. the former socialist
foreign minister, hubert védrine,
was given to the same
anti-americanism that moves his
successor, the bombastic and vain
dominique de villepin. it was
védrine, it should be recalled,
who in the late 1990s had dubbed
the united states a
"hyperpower." he had done
so before the war on terrorism,
before the war on iraq. he had done
it against the background of an
international order more concerned
with economics and markets than
with military power. in contrast to
his successor, védrine at least
had the honesty to acknowledge that
there was nothing unusual about the
way the united states wielded its
power abroad, or about
france's response to that
primacy. france, too, he observed,
might have been equally overbearing
if it possessed the united
states' weight and assets.
his successor gave france's
resentment highly moral claims.
villepin appeared evasive, at one
point, on whether he wished to see
a u.s. or an iraqi victory in the
standoff between saddam
hussein's regime and the
united states. anti-americanism
indulges france's fantasy of
past greatness and splendor and
gives france's unwanted muslim
children a claim on the political
life of a country that knows not
what to do with them.
the burden of modernity
to come bearing modernism to those
who want it but who rail against it
at the same time, to represent and
embody so much of what the world
yearns for and fears— that is the
american burden. the united states
lends itself to contradictory
interpretations. to the europeans,
and to the french in particular,
who are enamored of their laïcisme
(secularism), the united states is
unduly religious, almost
embarrassingly so, its culture
suffused with sacred symbolism. in
the islamic world, the burden is
precisely the opposite: there, the
united states scandalizes the
devout, its message represents
nothing short of an affront to the
pious and a temptation to the
gullible and the impressionable
young. according to the june bbc
survey, 78 percent of french polled
identified the united states as a
"religious" country,
while only 10 percent of jordanians
endowed it with that label.
religious to the secularists,
faithless to the devout— such is
the way the united states is seen
in foreign lands.
so many populations have the united
states under their skin. their rage
is oddly derived from that very
same attraction. consider the saudi
realm, a place where
anti-americanism is fierce. the
united states helped invent the
modern saudi world. the arabian
american oil company— for all
practical purposes a state within a
state— pulled the desert enclave
out of its insularity, gave it
skills, and ushered it into the
20th century. deep inside the
anti-americanism of today's
saudi arabia, an observer can
easily discern the dependence of
the saudi elite on their u.s.
connection. it is in the image of
the united states' suburbs and
urban sprawl that saudi cities are
designed. it is on the campuses of
harvard, princeton, and stanford
that the ruling elite are formed
and educated.
after september 11, 2001, the saudi
elite panicked that their ties to
the united states might be
shattered and that their world
would be consigned to what they
have at home. fragments of the
united states have been eagerly
embraced by an influential segment
of saudi society. for many, the
united states was what they
encountered when they were free
from home and family and age-old
prohibitions. today, an outing in
riyadh is less a journey to the
desert than to the mall and to
starbucks.
an academic in riyadh, in the midst
of an anti-american tirade about
all policies american, was keen to
let me know that his young son,
born in the united states, had
suddenly declared he no longer
wanted to patronize mcdonald's
because of the united states'
support of israel. the message was
plaintive and unpersuasive; the
resolve behind that
"boycott" was sure to
crack. a culture that casts so long
a shadow is fated to be emulated
and resented at the same time. the
united states is destined to be in
the politics— and imagination—
of strangers even when the country
(accurately) believes it is not
implicated in the affairs of other
lands.
in a hauntingly astute set of
remarks made to the new yorker in
the days that followed the
terrorism of september 11, the
egyptian playwright ali salem— a
free spirit at odds with the
intellectual class in his country
and a maverick who journeyed to
israel and wrote of his time there
and of his acceptance of that
country— went to the heart of the
anti-american phenomenon. he was
thinking of his own country's
reaction to the united states, no
doubt, but what he says clearly
goes beyond egypt:
people say that americans are
arrogant, but it's not true.
americans enjoy life and they are
proud of their lives, and they are
boastful of their wonderful
inventions that have made life so
much easier and more convenient.
it's very difficult to
understand the machinery of hatred,
because you wind up resorting to
logic, but trying to understand
this with logic is like measuring
distance in kilograms….these are
people who are envious. to them,
life is an unbearable burden.
modernism is the only way out. but
modernism is frightening. it means
we have to compete. it means we
can't explain everything away
with conspiracy theories. bernard
shaw said it best, you know. in the
preface to 'st. joan,' he
said joan of arc was burned not for
any reason except that she was
talented. talent gives rise to
jealousy in the hearts of the
untalented.
this kind of envy cannot be
attenuated. jordanians, for
instance, cannot be talked out of
their anti-americanism. in the bbc
survey, 71 percent of jordanians
thought the united states was more
dangerous to the world than al
qaeda. but jordan has been the rare
political and economic recipient of
a u.s. free trade agreement, a
privilege the united states shares
only with a handful of nations. a
new monarch, king abdullah ii, came
to power, and the free trade
agreement was an investment that
pax americana made in his reign and
in the moderation of his regime.
but this bargain with the hashemite
dynasty has not swayed the
intellectual class, nor has it made
headway among the jordanian masses.
on iraq and on matters palestinian,
for more than a generation now,
jordanians have not had a kind
thing to say about the united
states. in the scheme of
jordan's neighborhood, the
realm is benign and forgiving, but
the political life is restrictive
and tight. when talking about the
united states, jordanians have
often been talking to their rulers,
expressing their dissatisfaction
with the quality of the
country's public life and
economic performance. a pollster
venturing to jordan must understand
the country's temper, hemmed
in by poverty and overshadowed by
more resourceful powers all around
it: iraq to the east, israel to the
west, and syria and saudi arabia
over the horizon. a sense of
disinheritance has always hung over
jordan. the trinity of god,
country, and king puts much of the
political life of the land beyond
scrutiny and discussion. the
anti-americanism emanates from, and
merges with, this political
condition.
with modernism come the jews. they
have been its bearers and
beneficiaries, and they have paid
dearly for it. they have been taxed
with cosmopolitanism: the historian
isaac deutscher had it right when
he said that other people have
roots, but the jews have legs.
today the jews have a singular role
in u.s. public life and culture,
and anti-americanism is tethered to
anti-semitism. in the islamic
world, and in some european circles
as well, u.s. power is seen as the
handmaiden of jewish influence.
witness, for instance, the
london-based arab media's
obsession with the presumed
ascendancy of the
neoconservatives— such as former
chairman of the defense policy
board richard perle and deputy
secretary of defense paul
wolfowitz— in the making of u.s.
foreign policy. the neocons had
been there for the rescue of the
(muslim) bosnians and kosovars, but
the reactionaries in muslim lands
had not taken notice of that. left
to itself, the united states would
be fair-minded, this arab
commentary maintains, and it would
arrive at a balanced approach to
the arab-islamic world. this
narrative is nothing less than a
modernized version of the worldview
of that infamous forgery, the
protocols of the learned elders of
zion. but it is put forth by men
and women who insist on their
oneness with the modern world.
a century ago, in a short-story
called "youth," the great
british author joseph conrad
captured in his incomparable way
the disturbance that is heard when
a modern world pushes against older
cultures and disturbs their peace.
in the telling, marlowe,
conrad's literary double and
voice, speaks of the frenzy of
coming upon and disturbing the
east. "and then, before i
could open my lips, the east spoke
to me, but it was in a western
voice. a torrent of words was
poured into the enigmatical, the
fateful silence; outlandish, angry
words mixed with words and even
whole sentences of good english,
less strange but even more
surprising. the voice swore and
cursed violently; it riddled the
solemn peace of the bay by a volley
of abuse. it began by calling me
pig . . . ."
today, the united states carries
the disturbance of the modern to
older places— to the east and to
the intermediate zones in europe.
there is energy in the united
states, and there is force. and
there is resistance and
resentment— and emulation— in
older places affixed on the
delicate balancing act of a younger
united states not yet content to
make its peace with traditional
pains and limitations and
tyrannies. that sensitive french
interpreter of his country,
dominique moïsi, recently told of
a simple countryman of his who was
wistful when saddam hussein's
statue fell on april 9 in
baghdad's firdos square.
france opposed this war, but this
frenchman expressed a sense of
diminishment that his country had
sat out this stirring story of
political liberation. a society
like france with a revolutionary
history should have had a hand in
toppling the tyranny in baghdad,
but it didn't. instead, a
cable attached to a u.s. tank had
pulled down the statue, to the
delirium of the crowd. the new
history being made was a distinctly
american (and british) creation. it
was soldiers from burlington,
vermont, and linden, new jersey,
and bon aqua, tennessee— i single
out those towns because they are
the hometowns of three soldiers who
were killed in the iraq war— who
raced through the desert making
this new history and paying for
it.
the united states need not worry
about hearts and minds in foreign
lands. if germans wish to use
anti-americanism to absolve
themselves and their parents of the
great crimes of world war ii, they
will do it regardless of what the
united states says and does. if
muslims truly believe that their
long winter of decline is the fault
of the united states, no campaign
of public diplomacy shall deliver
them from that incoherence. in the
age of pax americana, it is
written, fated, or maktoob (as the
arabs would say) that the plotters
and preachers shall rail against
the united states— in whole
sentences of good american slang.
fouad ajami is the majid khadduri
professor at johns hopkins
university's school of
advanced international studies and
a contributing editor at u.s. news
& world report.
http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.c
om/extra/the_falseness_of_antiameri
canism.htm
Of coarse the haters have always been there. We can't even get a consensus from our closest ally, the British. I suppose we will just need to live with it.
It became a national disgrace when the Clintons took office. These two people are not healers by any stretch of the imagination. These are, not one, but two lightning rods that galvanize the American public. If anybody can drive a stake into the American phyche quicker, it would be Hillary's alter ego, Rahm Emanuel., and she hangs on his every word. |
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