Our friends are at war, too
suntimes.com
There are 192 countries in the world. One is America. The remaining 191 are mostly countries that hate America.
I say "mostly" because I don't want to get into a lot of quibbling about whether it's 183 or 185. Some hate America actively--that's to say, they're in favor of flying planes into American skyscrapers. Some (like France) despise America because they can't quite figure out how a great historic culture like theirs wound up a bit-player in a world dominated by ghastly vulgar cowboys. Others express their feelings more or less harmlessly by going out of their way to laud the most incompetent and ludicrous Americans, as the Swedes did the other day by giving Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. "For what?" you may be asking. Oh, come on. It was Jimmy who handed the Islamofascists their first great victory, in Iran a quarter-century ago. If that ain't worth a Swedish meatball, what is?
Faced with this worldwide hostility and contempt, you can say (as I have, in this space, on several occasions), "Screw 'em. Who needs those losers anyway?" But it's important to know where to draw the line, and I draw it here: There are a handful (just) of countries on this planet who still like America enough to be willing to send their troops into combat with U.S. forces--that's to say, their soldiers are prepared to fight and die alongside Americans on some godforsaken bit of foreign sod. It was British SAS commandoes who helped put down the Taliban uprising at Qala-i-Jangai, at which the CIA's Mike Spann was bitten to death; it was SAS men who saved his colleague, known only as "Dave," from meeting the same fate. The first soldier to die in combat in Afghanistan was an Australian.
Last weekend, hundreds of people were blown to pieces in two Balinese nightclubs. Most of them were Westerners. More than 30 Britons were killed. For Australians, the death toll is even greater: most of the hundreds still euphemistically listed as "missing" are Aussies. (Bali is Australia's Mexico, vacation-wise.) In relative population terms, last Saturday was Australia's 9/11. The personal stories exist at the same freakish random intersection of civilization and barbarism: Kosta and Maria Elfes, newlyweds from Sydney, are on their honeymoon. They're spending it searching the morgues for their four bridesmaids--two of Maria's sisters plus two friends. Imagine that: For as long as you live, your wedding anniversary will also be the anniversary of the murder of your family and friends.
After Sept. 11, Americans took it for granted that the rest of the civilized world would be moved by the simple human injustice of what happened. Australians have the right to expect the same. But, if anybody here's interested in this story, you'd never know it from watching the TV news. The networks are playing this like they would one of those Bangladeshi floods or a Turkish earthquake--just one of those goofy things that happens to obscure foreigners somewhere offshore thousands of miles away. It's not. These people were murdered by the same psychotic losers the victims of Sept. 11 were slaughtered by.
After 9/11, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, summed up his country's solidarity thus: "This is no time to be an 80 percent ally." He wasn't. But right now that's about 79 points more attention than the Bali massacre is attracting from the American networks. Even the joke "election" in Iraq is getting weirdly reverential coverage--perhaps because CNN and Co. have permanent bureaus there, conveniently housed in Saddam's Ministry of Information. As for the rest, it's Sniper Boy 24/7. I bet my assistant a hundred bucks that the sniper would turn out to be a Middle Eastern terrorist, and that bet's looking better every day. But, even if that's so and the sniper and the nightclub are part of the same story, 99 percent of the all-sniper-all-the-time dronefest is speculation, while the Bali end is full of interesting hard facts about the scale of both the Islamofascists' ambition and their depravity. The blow-dried blowhards on the news shows should be covering it. I know it's difficult: "ABC World News Tonight With Peter Jennings" is all Peter Jennings and no World News; ABC World News Headquarters in New York is a headquarters with no branch offices. CBS News covers the British Isles, Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent from a three-man bureau in London. Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up the rest of the budget.
That's one reason why I loathe "multiculturalism," the lazy but dominant philosophy of our times that insists all cultures are equally valid and worthy of respect. Multiculturalism doesn't actually involve knowing anything about other cultures--like, say, the capital of Malaysia or the principal exports of Indonesia. Instead, simply subscribing to the fluffy feeling that all cultures are just as good as any other absolves one of knowing the first thing about them. The mainstream media are among the biggest proponents of multicultural sappiness in this country, and their foreign coverage is a perfect indicator of their real interest in other cultures.
After 9/11, Queen Elizabeth, Britain and Australia's head of state, ordered the playing of American patriotic songs at Buckingham Palace. At St. Paul's Cathedral, she sang, for the first time in her life, a foreign national anthem--"The Star-Spangled Banner." It would be nice if America's head of state could make a reciprocal gesture, to let the Australians know that he stands with them as they stood with him. It makes no sense to be so careless and thoughtless about your last three or four real allies. It shows an inability to distinguish between countries almost as dumb as the Islamofascists, whose attitude was neatly summarized by a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden the other day, after they'd blown up a French oil tanker in Yemen: "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate," he said, "but no problem, because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels. That's the meaning of the Bali bomb: It doesn't matter whether you're a Wall Street trader or a Scandinavian stoner, they hate you all. But the American media seem to operate on a similar principle: They're all foreigners, so who cares? Australia is one of this country's few real friends in the world. We're not just fellow infidels, but brothers on a field of battle that stretches from Manhattan to Bali. If the American media don't understand that, then the American president needs to remind them.
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suntimes.com
Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. |
