Here is the previous weekly column that got her a lot of favorable mail. It is instructive to see that it was not just Muslims that delighted in our tragedy. "The Telegraph"
I found where I was when the terrorists hit home
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 11/09/2002)
Being an American in Britain on September 11 last year was a bizarre experience. Few Americans I know here can talk about it without some degree of pain or rage.
Not surprising, perhaps, that it was deranging. Part of the point of becoming an expatriate is being able to reinvent yourself: moving away from all the ties and limitations of your early life. Then you watch the place that you thought you had put behind you, hit by an apocalyptic tragedy out of a clear blue sky, and it makes a bonfire of that vanity.
What becomes clear is that you are not the new person that you thought you had created. However long you had lived here (36 years in my case), however deep you assumed your British roots now to be - raising a family and living out one's entire adult career here - you discovered that you were not British.
You may live in the place, but you are not of it. Home is where it always was. All of that - even the guilty self-indulgence of the introspection - was probably unavoidable. I was surprised by the force of it, but not by the phenomenon itself.
What astonished me were the attitudes to the event in this country, where I had, until that moment, presumed to feel at home, from a people I thought I knew.
Let me make one thing clear. Almost every American who has chosen to live permanently outside the United States knows its weaknesses. There is little that can be said about the gaucheries and fatuities and selfishnesses of Americans that I cannot recite myself.
After all, I decided to leave - and living in cynical, wicked old Abroad has taught me even more about what it is possible to despise in America's childlike, sentimental culture.
But none of that - none of it - prepared me for the avalanche of anti-American vituperation that poured from the mouths (and keyboards) of the educated, opinion-forming classes of Britain when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre fell.
In the first days, while many Americans here were still trying desperately to contact friends and family in New York to ascertain whether they and their loved ones were still alive (telephones were down, e-mail proved to be the only functioning communications system), we were treated to the Guardian comment pages filled with puerile vindictive abuse, largely to the effect that America had got everything that it deserved ("A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully").
Now whatever you may believe to be the failings of American foreign policy - and much of what became metropolitan received wisdom was, to put it charitably, eccentric and heavily skewed - who, in the name of human decency, would think it right to gloat at that precise moment over what they thought to be the consequences?
Do these people accost widows at funerals and give them smirking lectures to the effect that their husband's death was a direct result of his slothful habits? Or, more on a par perhaps, would the same authors have told the Japanese - in the week that it happened - that they had no one to blame but themselves for the dropping of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, given the bellicosity of their own behaviour? (A view that many prisoners of war might have supported, but would probably have uttered only in strict privacy.)
I am not talking about politics here. If I were, I would say that much of the criticism of American policy was speculative and wilfully ignorant, resting on what proved to be a false assumption that America would launch a precipitate and ill-thought out attack on Afghanistan that would end in futile defeat ("another Vietnam").
In the event, America took its time to plan a military operation that displaced the wicked Taliban regime, to the relief of the population of Kabul. But, as I say, I do not want to get bogged down in what was, at the time, the broadcast media's version of political reality. What I want to talk about is the most basic level of humanly appropriate response.
Who could possibly find it anything other than morally grotesque to bait and taunt people who have just suffered the worst terrorist attack in history - the mass murder of what at the outset was thought might be about 10,000 innocent civilians?
Well, quite a few people as it turned out. Within 48 hours of the attack, a special edition of the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Question Time, featured an audience of baiters and tormentors who shrieked incoherent accusations at the former American ambassador, Philip Lader, and slow hand-clapped him when he tried to speak.
The BBC admitted later that the programme seemed to have "gone awry" and that it "had not set out to cause offence", but admitted that some viewers had been "taken aback by the programme". Taken aback? Is this what used to be called British understatement?
But that is the past. What about now? Now we are hearing a chorus that is not so much virulent and nasty as crassly insensitive. There is a new line coming from the correspondents and British visitors to New York: isn't it about time you got over this? After all, in Britain we have lived with terrorism and its insecurities for years. We have learnt to get on with our lives in its aftermath. Why can't you?
The answer to this is that New York has done precisely that. Life and commerce, even air travel, have recovered pretty much their usual pace. The clean-up of the Ground Zero site was done with characteristic New York efficiency.
What remains is the American need to talk, which is incomprehensible to the British. (At least this does not surprise me. I know well the national predilection for silence on anything that threatens one's composure.)
Why do Americans have to keep talking their way through this? Because they are descended from people who left behind persecution and dispossession, and who risked everything to find a place where they could be safe.
Somehow, they have to find a way of dealing with the fact that they no longer are.
opinion.telegraph.co.uk |
