The United States and The United Kingdom

The United States v International Terrorism - Part 2
How anti-Americanism colours coverage by the British news media

The 11 September massacres in New York and at the Pentagon encouraged the expression of deep-seated British prejudices against the United States of America and a sense of satisfaction with its humiliation, at the same time as most Britons expressed genuine solidarity with that country.

Here we will look at how this appeared in one British newspaper, The Independent. Look first at these overstated front page headlines in that newspaper on the day following the attacks and the next day.

Doomsday America

The American Dream In Ruins

All-American Nightmare

As horrible as the events were they were far from representing the end of America or the aspirations of its people. Their origin outside of America and the varied nationalities of the victims made the use of "All-American" seem rather odd also.

Mary Dejevsky, until recently the Independent correspondent in the US, wrote from London that "The most powerful country in the world . . . was reduced to a gibbering, panicked state of siege. ………In the inquest . . . every angle will be explored, calling into question every aspect of the American way of doing things. …. Between the (Americans') paranoid suspicion of all things alien and the blissful acceptance of all things American . . .Americans, unlike Britons, are unused to comprehensive adversity. The spirit of the Blitz is not something Americans have experienced collectively."

Exaggeration, self-satisfaction and crude generalisation characterised her report. Never mind that nothing like these attacks happened during the wartime blitz (the total death toll in the blitz on London was 13,000) or that "comprehensive adversity" is, in fact, unknown to Britons.

Letters of Hate

Many of the letters published in the days that followed were far worse, however. Some exhibited an almost demented misrepresentation of and hatred for the United States.

On example was a letter from Andrew Pritchard. He wrote that the "defeat" suffered by the US in the attacks "will be a highly productive achievement" if it deflated that nation’s "overweening ego." Tony Greenstein offered some advice as to why Americans are "the most hated people and nation on earth." Freedom in the "West" had "been degraded to mean little more the licence to become rich at others’ expense" he wrote.

Another writer incensed by Americans seriously compared the effects of American influence in the modern world to the depredations of the conquistadors

One perplexing aspect of the response was that there were those who knew enough of the source of the attrocities to believe that the terrorists had been motivated by hatred of US policies but also warned the US not to lay the blame at the door of any particular group or retaliate because the identities of the criminals were not known.

It is not too far fetched to say that some of these writers were projecting their own hatred of America onto the poor and oppressed of the world. How else could they have come so swiftly to the conclusion that such hatred in the hearts of others was the cause. They slandered those whom they would like to believe they defend with their passionate assertions.

The Causes

There were many writers, of course, who did not express such hatred of the USA. But even amongst those who did not, many were convinced they knew what should be done to stop a recurrence. End world poverty. Stop "globalisation." They were frequent calls. Such opportunism was particularly indecent in the circumstances.

A cooler examination of the facts might have suggested that there was nothing that the United States might do that would be sufficiently pleasing for some of its enemies to appease them.

The critics imagined that if there was hatred it was of necessity engendered by bad acts. That is no so, as our knowledge of racial hatred tells us. The day after the attacks Peter Maass reported in Slate on the attitude of some students in Macedonia towards the US. They were angry at what they saw as American help for Albanian fighters, terrorists in their eyes. So here the US was guilty of supporting Muslim terrorists, at the very moment it was under attack at home for plotting to destroy Islam.

It is surely true that whatever a nation as strong and wealthy as the United States does there will still be envy and hatred amongst some of those whose desires are frustrated.

Populist Fascism

The critics of the US did not ask what aspect of US foreign policy had caused Iranian clerics to sentence Salman Rushdie to death for his writing. Nor how globalisation or poverty could explain the slaughter of children by Taliban fighters. To point to religious fervour, however, would be to forgo the opportunity to castigate the USA. Nonetheless even the anti-American journalist Robert Fisk concedes that in the fight against Marxist rule of Afghanistan Osama bin Laden believed "his struggle was as much about defending his religion as defeating the Soviet Union."

Those who instructed the US to change its ways if it wanted cool the wrath of its enemies missed another point. Such success would encourage terrorists, not deter them.

The critics of America also demonstrated how much it was their own concerns that they had in mind rather than those of their proxies in Islam by ignoring what the most likely perpetrators of the crime, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qa’ida say about themselves. Osama bin Laden had said that his war was against Jews and "Crusaders." His is not simply a complaint against particular aspects of American foreign policy that might be amended. It is a religious crusade. His aim is to drive non-Muslims from the Islamic counties and to destroy Israel. It is a fight to unite the Arab nations in one theocratic state in which clerics rule over the people. No conceivable change in US policy would be enough to satisfy these objectives.

Imagine Saudi Arabia was a democracy threatened by Islamic radicals. If the US gave support to that democratic Saudi Arabia would the attitude of Bin Laden be any different to his attitude to a US that has military forces in an undemocratic country?

In fact those who might most easily be supposed to take satisfaction in the massacres condemned the attacks. The Taliban protectors of bin Laden "has almost as many enemies in the Middle East as it had in America" wrote Robert Fisk, a British journalist and constant critic of the US. He reported that the spiritual guide of the Hizbollah fighters had declared that they wished to be friends with the American people.

We may take that with a pinch of salt. But at least it showed a higher degree of common sense than so many British commentators.

More from The Independent

9 November. Natasha Walter reported that on 11 September she had joined a protest, "a fiesta of life against death," in London. At the end a speaker announced the World Trade Center attack. "The crowd around me cheered .. . a sense of excitement fizzed in the air."

16 November. David Aaronovitch reported that a British Coalition Against the War conference in October had voted down a motion proposed by Iraqi and Iranian members condemning "Islamic terrorism."

Part 1

Top