AMERICA-HATERS WITHIN
Back to the Politically Correct Detractor's Page
September 19, 2001
John PodhoretzTHIS really isn't the moment to hate America, but not to worry - the hate-America crowd is still right there, still dripping with contempt for the nation's politics, its leaders, its economic system and for their foolish fellow citizens.
Comfortably tenured on college campuses, they live in comforting indolence like 18th-century bluebloods. In New York, they dwell in large rent-controlled apartments from which they collect book advances and foundation-grant money.
These blame-America-firsters enjoy the fruits of liberty and prosperity far more than most Americans - and they are less grateful for it than those who have to scratch and scrape for an extra dollar or two.
Item No. 1: Susan Sontag. Novelist and essayist. Showered with praise and love since the late 1950s, winner of an unimaginable number of prizes, she joined the rolls of political infamy in the 1960s when she declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history." In this week's New Yorker, she contributes a few hundred words that indicate she's learned nothing since.
She dares to compare the politicians we elect with the totalitarian masters of the former Soviet Union: "The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible . . . The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."
She goes on to say that America is a cowardly nation because our military bombs targets in Iraq from a height that makes it impossible for anti-aircraft weaponry to reach them. She'd doubtless prefer that the Iraqis could shoot down American pilots the way the North Vietnamese (whose cause she supported and whose genocidal impulses she cheered) once did.
She concludes by saying: " 'Our country is strong,' we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be."
Our nation should be weak and defenseless, in Sontag's view, because that is the only fair thing for an immoral and hateful nation to be. Which is what Susan Sontag, who recently posed for an Absolut Vodka ad, thinks it is.
Item No. 2: Joel Rogers, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, has a column in the Nation magazine that rivals Sontag's in its loathsomeness - though it is perhaps more loathsome because at least Sontag doesn't offer little bromides about how terrible the events were last week. Rogers does, but he also wants to spit on his country too.
The first of his contextual observations is this: "Our own government, through much of the past 50 years, has been the world's leading 'rogue state.' Merely listing the plainly illegal or unauthorized uses of force the U.S. was responsible for during the long period of cold war, and continued during the past decade of 'purposeless peace' . . . would literally take volumes. And behind that list reside the bodies of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children, whose lives we have taken without any pretense to justice."
Oh, really? Millions of innocents, most of them children, had their lives "taken" by the United States? This is mindless, lawless, self-hating nonsense.
Presumably Rogers is speaking mainly of U.S. military action in Iraq and Serbia. In any possible reading of the principles underlying war, the responsibility for the deaths in those conflicts belongs with the dictators of those countries, whose aggression against neighboring lands and peoples caused the military action - and who were repeatedly warned against continuing it, warned for the sake not only of peace, but also for the preservation of their own suffering populaces.
And what of the untold hundreds of millions who were liberated from the shackles of totalitarianism by the United States as a result of our supposedly criminal behavior during the Cold War?
Oh, excuse me. I'm talking about Joel Rogers, who wrote this article for The Nation - the magazine that supported Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, the Sandinistas and the El Salvadoran guerrillas and Palestinian terrorists and anyone else who made it his mission to destroy democracy and capitalism.
The moral idiocy of Sontag and Rogers is not an isolated matter. These views remain commonplace in the hallowed halls of academe and the leafy groves called "writer's colonies" where bad pseudo-novelists like Sontag retire to craft unreadable sentences in the manner of French post-modernists.
And yet, no matter what they say, this nation will protect them. The military they abhor will go to war to keep them safe and free. The president and political leaders they condemn will make life-and-death decisions on their behalf.
And one day, perhaps, they will awaken from their moral slumber and see the truth. Which would be the final reward they would receive from the United States of America, which has so bathed them in blessings.
NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COM
are trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.
Copyright 2001 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.Three Cowards and a Diva: Extreme Liberalism and Terrorism
Jewish World Review Sept. 17, 2001 / 28 Elul, 5761
Lewis A. Feinhttp://www.jewishworldreview.com -- SEARCHING for the domestic political message of last Tuesday's horrific events? Look around for whom you don't see: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and, yes, Barbra Streisand.
Streisand? Farrakhan? These individuals -- until last Tuesday, the erstwhile spokespersons for liberal Democratic politics and racial hatred -- now confirm their extremism by their very silence, the inability on the one hand to approvingly endorse President Bush's actions and their perceived hatred of the public's unity on the other.
For these individuals thrive whenever (Crown Heights) or wherever (Durban, South Africa) the public disagrees.
The more immediate question is: Why do Messrs. Sharpton, Jackson and Farrakhan (respectively, the Moe, Larry and Curly of racial politics) remain relatively silent amidst the greatest attack on U.S. soil? After all, there is Jackson's recent trip to Durban, South Africa, where the United Nations staged its world conference against racism. Never mind Jackson's Orwellian behavior, including his demands for racial reparations and his physical embrace of Yasser Arafat. His presence in South Africa reveals everything: that America -- either because or in spite of its refusal to award reparations -- is, in its own peculiar way (like the actions of Tuesday's terrorists), decidedly un-American.
Thus, Jackson's long embrace of authoritarian leaders, including Arafat and Fidel Castro, reaches its climax --- the ghastly silence that exposes his comical ignorance, or the mournful disdain that his dictatorial patrons are sincere, that America must die. Or, consider Jackson's silence within the context of his previous behavior, as he protests the legitimacy of President Bush's election or the primacy of Israel's survival. Reverend, heal thy self!
And then there is the team of Sharpton and Farrakhan. Both individuals demand or expect popular acceptance (Sharpton is a former and possibly future Democratic political candidate), while employing the conspiratorial language of the lunatic left. So, there is Farrakhan's tragically ironic press conference about Tuesday's events, a farcical tribute to law enforcement and a sly condemnation of law enforcement as racist evil.
Yet, for every impassioned word condemning Tuesday's Muslim extremists, a more painful question remains: Where is Minister Farrakhan's righteous horror for the brethren of Tuesday's terrorists, the suicide bombers for whom the target is not fifty stars but one, the Star of David?
Now imagine Al Sharpton as New York City's principal spokesperson. Would or could Sharpton unite New Yorkers like Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Even worse, Sharpton would not inspire nor respect the city's police officers (his rhetorical attacks are often and several), the brave individuals responsible for the city's order.
Finally, there is Barbra Streisand.
Remember Babs, the same woman who vehemently proclaimed her desire to leave America should George H. W. Bush defeat Bill Clinton in 1992? By her own admission, then, a nation governed by a Republican -- presumably, any White House bereft of Bill Clinton -- is sort of illegitimate. And, in her own way (though undoubtedly of a different kind), Miss Streisand is the entertainment industry's version of Timothy McVeigh --- a person for whom radical ideology, whether perverse libertarianism or demented liberalism, means everything.
Curiously, the above figures -- even those with personal web sites -- remain conspicuously silent concerning Tuesday's events.
Perhaps the nation's unity, especially for a conservative wartime president, disturbs the far left. For George W. Bush now leads a united nation, prepared for war and steeled toward victory. But it is the silence of the few that exposes the truth of extreme liberalism's many:
"That this group refuses in any circumstances to fight for G-d and country."
JWR contributor Lewis A. Fein is a writer and Internet entrepreneur in Los Angeles. Comment by clicking here.