They don't want a solution, it may burn their thrones.
I quite agree. The rest of the world needs to come to the same conclusion before anything can be done about it.
I'm doing my little bit. Trying to get the BBC to report the Middle East news a little more evenly. i.e. not so anti Israel and anti American
Comment from "The Times"
timesonline.co.uk
I'm sick and tired of this anti-US bigotry
by elizabeth wurtzel
Having grown up in New York City, and then been a student at one of those fancy universities that had a sizeable contingent of international undesirables, I am now accustomed to the squawks and squeals of anti-Americanism. I have on more than one occasion had an evening in which a tedious political conversation is finally brought to a close when the son of a Third World despot declares in broken English: “America, you think you are the land of the free! You are not even allowed to visit Cuba!” Two hundred-plus years of liberty thrown into question because my vacation plans cannot include an island 90 miles away from Miami. We have learnt to accept this kind of inebriated rhetoric as the price you pay for being American.
But having just spent a couple of weeks in the United Kingdom, backed into various corners and crevices in defence of US foreign policy (which I mostly think is indefensible, so you can imagine how annoying it was), I finally think enough is enough. I don’t want to hear another word of it. At this point the pitch of anti-US sentiment is such that it is its own justification (that is, if the United States wants to do it, it must be wrong).
One evening I found myself at dinner in a literary club with an American friend and someone from England and someone from France and some other person from some other place. A range of Europeans. My US friend and I were discussing the State Department’s reasoning about invading Iraq. And then we were talking about reports from the Rand Corporation or the Brookings Institution or some other think-tanks. But none of the Europeans sitting around us could believe that there were US policymakers actually giving these issues all this much thought. It was as if thoughtfulness and American-ness were mutually exclusive. As if this were a country full of stupid idiots.
And no one seemed interested in letting little inconvenient things such as facts get in the way of their sense that the Americans must be wrong. I had not been in England for more than 24 hours before a student at a Notting Hill dinner table informed me that 9/11 was masterminded by the Jews and the CIA to create a pretext for the US to attack Muslim countries. I’d heard this before; it had been reported in an Egyptian newspaper, so I was not that surprised. But as a Jew, I was a little bit insulted — I mean, why would we let the CIA, which has bungled one Latin American coup after another, in on our little plot?
I am one of the few Americans I know who has expressed disappointment by our reaction to 9/11 — I have always felt that if all we got from those toppling towers was a sense of our own victimisation, if it failed to make us a more compassionate and thoughtful people, then those 3,000 lost lives had taught us nothing. So I would sit there, in the parlours of the British intelligentsia, agreeing that it was an outrage that the US had treated the loss of 3,000 people as the Blitz — but my sense of worldly perspective became worthless in the face of all this otherworldly rage I encountered.
If I were to talk to Europeans the way you talk to me, here’s what I’d say (leaning back in my dinner chair with easy condescension, rings of Marlboro smoke streaming from my nostrils): if it weren't for the US, you all would be speaking German, an occupied colony of the Third Reich, turning your friends into the Gestapo while they did the same, and life would be that way, and how would you like that? How would you like to be a continent of cringing collaborators, would–be Vichys? Deutsch–Europe uber alles!
If y’all (as we say in Texas) don’t get a little more sensitive and just plain decent when you talk to us and about us, you will find people like me sounding like jingoist imbeciles. You will lose the possibility of an American opposition to US policy decisions — no one on this side of the Atlantic will give a damn about anyone on the other side of the ocean.
I mean, why should we care? We can’t even go to Havana on holiday. |
