The Useful Idiots
News: America closes in on bin Laden
INTRODUCING an occasional monitor of Western defeatism. The atrocities in New York and Washington brought out some elevated emotions in Britain. But uglier sentiments are also being voiced.
Many in the Left-wing press and the BBC are beginning to take the line that the attack was somehow the fault of Americans themselves. "American bond traders, you might say, are as innocent and undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants," a New Statesman editorial read. "Well, yes and no." After all, the Americans helped to bring the calamity on themselves, thinks the paper, since "they preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader". In yesterday's Mail on Sunday, Suzanne Moore blamed terrorism on US foreign policy, and on the country's "gas-guzzling", "complacency" and "spiritual barrenness".
The day after the massacre, the Guardian ran several opinion pieces that linked the attack with "global injustices" and "world poverty", as well as an article by Labour's George Galloway, arguing that in much of the world "people will consider the US to have had to swallow its own medicine". The next day, no fewer than three opinion columns - one of them headlined, "They can't see why they are hated" - laid into American "arrogance". A fourth, by Hugo Young, attacked the US, albeit in more measured tones, for its isolationism. (Thus Americans are condemned if they take up their global responsibilities, and equally condemned if they don't.)
Underlying almost all these articles is a common refrain: that the outrage should persuade the US to change its foreign policy, and that Britain should play no part in any retaliation. Or, as Saddam Hussein argued on Saturday, that the West should display "common sense, and not force". In taking the same line, the useful idiots of the liberal Left are acting like proxies for those who hate the West and everything it represents. We'll keep you posted on them. |
