Another Analysis Of Anti-Americanism

Ajami makes a great deal of sense on this issue of global cultural domination by the United States. There is a great deal of irony here. The very things the world hates about the United States are the very things it most admires. If this be (fair & balanced) dualism, so be it.

The Falseness of Anti-Americanism
By Fouad Ajami

"America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands and peoples. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism. Witness the duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The same embassies targeted by the masters of terror are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden country. It is of green cards and houses with lawns, far away from the mullahs, that the crowd in Tehran chanting "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really dreams.

The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its hipness, the American ways and techniques. In Doha, Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most influential cleric, delivers sermons on the arrogance of the United States. Egyptian-born, political to his fingertips, and in full mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, he thunders that the United States has appointed itself judge and jury in Iraq.

But a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click on his religious edicts in Arabic and HTML. Or what about his way with television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an immensely popular program of his. That art form surely owes a debt to the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional Cairo education prepared him for this wired, portable religion.

And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's degree in biology, a son earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida, and yet another son embarked on that quintessential American degree, an MBA, at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization.

To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears--that is the American burden. To the Europeans, and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their laïcisme (secularism), the United States is unduly religious, its culture suffused with sacred symbolism. In the Islamic world, the burden is precisely the opposite: The United States scandalizes the devout and is an affront to the pious. According to a June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout--such is the way the United States is seen.

Many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage is oddly derived from their attraction. Consider Saudi Arabia, a place where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped pull the desert enclave out of its insularity and ushered it into the twentieth century. Today, Saudi cities mimic U.S. suburbs, and their ruling elites are formed and educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be fixed in the politics--and imaginations--of strangers even when the country accurately believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other lands. People cannot be talked out of this kind of anti-Americanism. Though Jordan is the recipient of a U.S. free-trade agreement, a privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations, 71 percent of Jordanians believe the United States is more dangerous to the world than al-Qaeda. A sense of disinheritance has always hung over Jordan, and anti-Americanism emanates from it.

In Greece, hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians and Kosovars. The same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq. Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union, but the ethno-nationalism of Greece spins a narrative of Hellenic persecution at the hands of the United States.

The aggrieved glide over the role the U.S. played in the defense and rehabilitation of Greece after World War II. They overlook the lifeline that migration to the U.S. offered untold numbers of Greeks, where they now prosper. The malady here is a Greek variant of what plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture that, in an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world, searches for foreign "devils."

It is regularly argued today that the United States, in its post- 9/11 hubris, summoned up today's anti-Americanism. But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. It was during the 1990s that the Islamist children of Egypt set off for Hamburg and Kandahar to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings.

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's Jean-Marie Colombani, "We are all Americans." But Colombani was soon back with a tone of belligerent judgment and disapproval in his book All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which he described as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never held that sympathy in the first place.

Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class: On November 3, 2001, French writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard sketched the perpetrators of September 11 as acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. "All the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic…. It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed."

It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. Foreign minister Dominique de Villepin appeared evasive at one point on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism of this sort indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor, and gives France's unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.

That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moisi, recently told of a simple fellow countryman who, when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square, expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it.

The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States. And they will do so in whole sentences of good American slang.

Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. This is excerpted from the September/October issue of Foreign Policy.

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