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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (86226)	3/25/2003 4:21:33 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Jay Norlinger in WSJ.com March 25, 2003, 8:50 a.m. "You're late," Several readers have been kind enough to ask where I've been. I'll tell you: I've been to a conference about anti-Americanism. It was directed by Paul Hollander, one of the world's foremost experts on that subject. For a few days, we chewed over this great "anti-," anti-Americanism. It can be as mysterious and frightful as that other great anti-, anti-Semitism. I remember one of the first times I marveled at the weird phenomenon of anti-Semitism: It was, many years ago, reading that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a big seller in Japan. Japan! Where there was nary a kibbutz! But the anti-Americanism we are now witnessing is as dismaying and gross a phenom as any I can remember. We are witnessing that anti-Americanism in Europe, of course, and in the capitals of the Middle East, but also on our own streets. San Francisco, unsurprisingly, has been particularly vulgar. In the last few weeks, I've tried to put myself in the shoes of an antiwar protester, a useful exercise not just for a journalist, but for anybody. And let me share with you, just briefly, something I came up with. If I were antiwar, but retained my essential nature, I might oppose the Iraq effort for one or more of several reasons: because I was a pacifist; because I was devoted to the U.N. Security Council, whose approval was paramount to me; because I believed in perpetual sanctions and inspections; because I thought that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But I would still reason, "Even though I'm against this war, at least the Iraqi people will be free of Saddam Hussein. At least a byproduct of our war will be the toppling of one of the cruelest tyrannies of our time. No more torture chambers. No more rape rooms. No more putting men through shredders. No more cutting out of tongues for saying the wrong thing. No more 'Republic of Fear,' as Kanan Makiya memorably put it, in the title of his book." But you hear none of this from the antiwar protesters. At least I don't. Their lack of compassion for the Iraqi people is staggering. It's almost as though the continued torture and murder of innocents were better than any quarter given to George W. Bush: the Texan, the churchgoer, the villain. We're all supposed to respect dissent. It is, indeed, part of the American Way! But I must confess that I perceive very, very little to respect in the current armies of dissent. Henry David Thoreau is dissent; this is madness and meanness. Of all the reports to come out of Iraq thus far, the one I found the most moving appeared in the Guardian ? yes, the Guardian, not exactly an organ of the Republican National Committee. It concerned the city of Safwan, where "Ajami Saadoun Khlis, whose son and brother were executed under the Saddam regime, sobbed like a child on the shoulder of [the paper's] Egyptian translator. He mopped the tears but they kept coming. 'You just arrived,' he said. 'You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave." You're late. And We came out of the grave. Why do words like that have no impact whatsoever? Again, even if I were antiwar ? yet retained something like my present nature ? I would rejoice over that, or at least find comfort in it. At this conference, I used a car ? I don't, much, in New York City ? and I thus had a radio, which was tuned now and then to NPR. I will say, briefly, about NPR that it is as appalling as its most vehement detractors contend. I doubt that you would ever hear statements like Ajami Saadoun Khlis's over NPR. And the neutrality that the network ? or whatever you call it ? maintains is almost sick, given the moral gap between the American government and the regime it seeks to destroy. REST AT:http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/impromptus032503.asp