By Arnold Ages
The anti-Americanism referred to here is not the time-honored Canadian pastime of dumping on Americans for their brashness, super patriotism, cultural backwardness, and Hollywood domination. Nor is it a question of the central and South American jibes at the United States for its economic opportunism, its United Fruit Company monopolies and its gringo imperialism. These are mild criticisms in comparison with the phenomenon under scrutiny, which can be described as something far more visceral, intense and toxic — and which bears a startling resemblance to that other non-filterable virus, antisemitism.
The major source of the toxic version of anti-Americanism today is Islamist rhetoric and it began long before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s major proponent was an Egyptian intellectual by the name of Sayyid Qutub who made a trek to the United States in the 1960s and who, on his return, wrote what could be called satanic sentences about that country as the fountain of impurity and as the source of cosmic sinfulness in the universe.
It would take a battery of psychiatrists to do a psychohistorical analysis of Qutub to understand the irrationality of the man who was eventually imprisoned and executed by the Egyptians, not for his widely applauded anti-American rants but because of his subversive activities on behalf of radical Muslim extremist groups in the country.
Unfortunately Qutub has been resurrected and his posthumous contribution to Muslim society in a breviary of hatred directed against Americans, and of course, against Jews. What is fascinating, if somewhat disquieting, about this new-old syndrome is the curious parallels that one can draw between the pathology of antisemitism and its sick cousin, anti-Americanism. The major similarities reside in the use of hysterical rhetoric in the use of a scapegoat on which to unload not the sins of humankind but the excuses for the failures and shortcomings that characterize the society that issues the complaints.
Ironically, one of the best analyses of anti-Americanism comes from a Frenchmen, a rather ironical thing, because the French intellectuals are among the most enthusiastic of the secondary phalanx of American bashers. Jean Francois Revel published a book on the subject in 2000, one year before the Twin Towers débâcle.
In this book he traces the identikit of the American haters, especially in Arab countries, and describes their hatred as “the escape hatch of societies suffering from chronic failure, societies that have completely messed up their evolution toward democracy and economic growth; instead of looking to their own incompetence and corruption as the cause, they finger the West and the United States.”
Revel also has some very sober thoughts to convey about one of the other agencies of anti-Americanism — the European Union — which Charles Krauthammer has described as the “wholly owned subsidiary of the Arab League.” After demonstrating that American power is the only agency in the world capable “of saving Mexico from economic collapse, dissuading communist China from attacking Taiwan and mediating between India and Pakistan,” Revel says this about the European Union apropos of North Korea’s megaphone boasts about its atomic power: the European Union, says Revel, “sent the Swedish prime minister to grovel before Jim Jong II, the criminal chief of one of the last totalitarian jails on the planet.”
Revel identifies the anti-American fundamentalist Islamo-Fascism of Bin Laden as the most poisonous and virulent form of the phenomenon. The terrorism that he sponsors, notes Revel, has no social or political agenda and is not rooted in any concern for the poverty of Muslim societies. So much for the “root causes” thesis about terrorism espoused by misguided liberals.
For Revel, bin Laden and his ilk “utterly reject as compatible with the Koran all measures that might contribute to improvement — democracy, secularism, intellectual freedom and critical thought, equality for women, pluralism and openness to other cultures.” Revel is also sick and tired of the apologists in the west who do mental gymnastics to soften the real agenda of the bin Ladens.
“It is quite simply to convert the whole of humanity to Islam by force. Just to state such an ambition is to lay bare its irrational and unrealizable absurdity. That is why it is beside the point to rationalize the new terrorism by concrete factors such as inequalities between nations. What must be understood is that in the eyes of the terrorists, terrorism is justified because it strikes at the infidels who refuse to embrace Islam. As it is, an abyss separates them from any rational course of action and terrorism is the parody of policy that serves to fill it.”
The call that bin Laden and his evil sidekick Ayman Zawahari have made to kill Americans wherever they can be found is a nihilist conversion of Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am,” into “I kill, therefore I am.” Jews will understand instinctively the menace that hides behind that statement.
Arnold Ages is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo (Ontario).
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