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The Nexus of Anti-Americanism

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  • The Nexus of Anti-Americanism

    A Marriage of Anti-American Hatred

    By Keith Platfoot
    The OSU Lantern | April 30, 2004

    The word on the Arab street is the Middle East hates America more than ever, according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in a statement published last week.

    Of course, he's probably right. Our efforts to democratize Iraq could be the seed of revolution, relegating Muslim theocracies to join communism in the dustbin of history. Our consistent support for Israel's right to exist gets in the way of the fundamentalists' violent anti-Semitic - excuse me - anti-Zionist ambitions. Of course they hate America.

    So do many Europeans. Their sentiment is not, as some would have you believe, simply anger in response to our invasion of Iraq. It's a long-standing hostility rooted in their view of America as degenerate, an opinion that was popular among European intellectuals 200 years ago, well before the rise of the United States to superpower status.

    But we really don't need Al-Jazeera and the BBC constantly reminding us how terrible America is - we can do that ourselves.

    After all we've got Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. We have entire legions of intellectual adolescents at our universities - and I'm referring to both students and faculty - who honestly believe America is everything that is wrong with the world. Media elites and Hollywood celebrities join in the chorus of a never-ending song of national self-loathing.

    They have their own reasons, but on one point foreign and domestic America-bashers agree: America sucks. And on that point, they're wrong.

    We see Hollywood types on national television trashing America, and then ironically claiming that their views are being censored by the disapproving government. The communist regime in Cuba, on the other hand, receives their everlasting praise. Maybe they ought to try being a government critic in Cuba, China, Russia, North Korea or one of the many other countries without a free press. There they'd be lucky to just be censored - they'd probably be jailed or executed.

    The same hypocrisy is evident when it comes to matters of religious toleration. Secularists bristle when President Bush mentions his faith or invokes the name of God, as if his acknowledgment of the Almighty might threaten the separation of church and state. They don't seem to mind the fact that in Arab countries governed by Islamic law, there is no concept of a church and state - they are one and the same. Forget that there is no God but Allah, and you might get an unpleasant visit from the state religious police.

    Peaceniks say America is militaristic. They point to our massive defense budget and our many military interventions. And yet they fail entirely to mention the fact that if it were not for American military might in the last century, we might all today be saluting the swastika or hammer and sickle. That scary U.S. military/industrial complex we all hear about is the same one that has made freedom from oppression possible for the last 200 years.

    Our European critics delight in calling Americans lazy and stupid. French citizens, meanwhile, work a 35-hour workweek and insist on six weeks of vacation every year. As for stupid American inventors, they have worked overtime, creating many of the modern marvels of transportation, industry, communication and computerization. Telephones, airplanes, the steel plow and the Internet were all born of American ingenuity.

    The American ideals of capitalism and democracy have done more to better the condition of mankind than anything since the inception of Christianity. And what other nation, besides America, has shed so much blood to protect the liberties of other countries, asking only in return enough land to bury our dead?

    I'm not saying that America is perfect, or can do no wrong. But on the balance sheet of history, America's good far outweighs the bad. If America-haters were accountants, they'd be fired.

    http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=13198

  • #2
    Originally posted by Leader
    The word on the Arab street is the Middle East hates America more than ever
    It's a lie, they allready hated us.
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

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