Anti-American Europe

The next time any of you read about some glossy American monthly throwing a bash that will feature the presence of, say, Martin Amis, please try to remember the following: writing in London's Guardian, the British lefty intelligentsia's house organ, the dwarfish and unreadable Amis described the WTC outrage as "Terror [being] political communication by other means." Not content with that smart-assed remark, he saw the collapse of the WTC as "the apotheosis of the postmodern era." Not bad coming from someone who bored us during the Reagan years with his fears of nuclear war and the effect Reagan's warmongering was having on his children. Showing off his humanity, Amis then suggested a utopian solution, a bombardment of the Afghan people with food parcels marked "Lendlease-USA."

Amis, a close friend of Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, is not alone in scoring anti-American points following the bombing. Seumas Milne, a Stalinist editor of the Guardian, argued that the victims in the World Trade Center had less of a right to live than an Arab, because they had had the chance to vote for Ralph Nader and had failed. The mind boggles. One Rana Kabbani writing in the same Guardian said, "All must kowtow to the Pentagon and the almighty dollar, or be blown to smithereens."

Mind you, not all the Brits are as bad as the above. Mary Ann Sieghart, a columnist for the Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch of New York Post and Fox network fame, offered that she was struck by how men were much angrier and emotional than women following the attack. "The twin towers are two huge phallic symbols, populated with mainly men, most of whom are in the macho business of making money. They were then attacked by two more phallic symbols-jet airliners-and soon after are cut to their bases... How much more emasculating could a terrorist's action be?" I guess it doesn't take Sigmund Freud to conclude that Seighart suffers from penis envy-just as it didn't take too much hand-wringing by her editor to kill this rubbish. Her column never appeared, which in a way is a pity. It would have put the wild-eyed kind of feminism she espouses in the right perspective.

The British left cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Its hatred of capitalism and Uncle Sam is such that it finds it quite acceptable to see the mass murder of 6000-plus innocent people as a message that needed to be delivered. Paul Foot, a commentator and nephew of Michael Foot, leader of the Labor Party from 1980 to 1983, described the attacks as the violence of the conquered, the exploited and the oppressed. The fact that they were financed by the son of a billionaire does not seem to matter. In the left's grotesque way of thinking, Tuesday's victims were the terrorists.

The BBC, supposedly a neutral body but nothing of the kind, broadcast a program called Question Time that was so staggeringly inappropriate it reduced Philip Lader, ex-American ambassador to England, to tears. Lader is a nice person who tried to bend over backwards to see the opposite point of view. The BBC, however, had stacked the room with zealous lefties and hardcore Muslims who screamed abuse against America and compared the country to Nazi Germany. Poor America, the nation that twice has saved European bacon by shedding its blood.

Even the Sunday Times had to get in on the kick-Uncle-Sam-while-he's-down game. John Humphrys, the British equivalent of Tim Russert as host of the Today program, wrote how wrong we are "to damn those who did it as evil, as though there is nothing more to say, as though we still believe in a devil with a forked tail." See what I mean about the inability to distinguish between right and wrong?

And it's not only the so-called intellectuals of the left who are using such grotesque and vile arguments. Tony Blair might have made a good impression in the Big Bagel with his impersonation of sadness and respect for the dead, but he and his government are the ones that have allowed hundreds of convicted murderers in the IRA to go free, and refused to arrest the known terrorist bombers of Omagh. It is the British government that allows a fifth column of rabidly anti-Christian and anti-Western fanatics to live in Britain, forking out one million pounds in legal assistance to an aide of bin Laden's while he fights extradition. Talk about the patients taking over the asylum.

The egregious Louis Michel, Belgian foreign minister, was among the first to declare that "We are not at war." In other words, America is a bully with whom we will make the right noises but never actually back in his hour of need. Well, all I can say is that America has been warned for a very long time. Europeans are not to be trusted or relied upon, nor are left-wingers in general. What America should do is not support repressive regimes or military dictatorships, be evenhanded where Palestine is concerned and take its revenge when good and ready.