[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND SCARY: America, the Global Target - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

America, the Global Target
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By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006; B07

Hoping to lower tensions between the Muslim world and the West, British 
Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained the other day that the world 
confronts "a clash about civilization," not "a clash between 
civilizations." But the overriding lesson of events since Sept. 11, 
2001, may be that you can't have one without the other.

In radical Islamic propaganda, the United States has graduated from 
being a mere Great Satan out to undermine Iran's ayatollahs to being 
depicted as a global monster responsible for virtually every crime and 
failing since the dawn of modern history. Meet the new Jews: the Americans.

Don't misunderstand. Americans have not replaced Jews at the top of the 
hate parade in Islamic countries. But the history of anti-Semitism, a 
word coined in Germany to provide a bogus scientific basis for prejudice 
against Jews, and its spread in recent years across the Middle East as 
an all-purpose explanation of whatever is wrong, should give Americans 
no cause for complacency.

The centrality of American power to global change -- good and bad, 
economic and political, topsy and turvy -- inevitably carries with it a 
heavy burden abroad of resentment and opposition. In the wake of Sept. 
11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a widespread stereotyping and a 
visceral hatred that imputes racial characteristics to national policies 
and actions have also taken hold.

The distemper of these global times can be read in a wide variety of 
settings, where this new virulent anti-Americanism competes with 
historical anti-Semitism as a single explanation for the failures and 
delusions of entire nations.

The change can be seen in Turkish and Egyptian movie houses, where 
overflow crowds watch depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, 
firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national 
character. It flows through the fanatical statements of Osama bin Laden 
and others that conflate "Jews" and "Crusaders." It peeks out of an 
overjoyed online announcement I came across last week that Hitler's 
favorite book, "The Riddle of the Jew's Success," is back in print.

Nothing new in this, it can be said. Besides, American movies, comics, 
journalists and politicians among others have never hesitated to 
stereotype Arabs, Turks or any other foreigners for their purposes, and 
often in extremely crude terms. Finally, the terrible polarizing effect 
of the conflict in Iraq and the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and 
elsewhere do invite harsh criticism of Americans rooted not in animus 
but in a sense of justice.

But the central and intrusive role of the United States in unleashing 
the traumatic changes of globalization on families, workplaces and 
nations everywhere brings unintended consequences. The forces that 
created anti-Semitism are not confined to one group of people or one 
moment in history.

" The Jew is in every respect the center of the language of the Third 
Reich, indeed of its whole view of the epoch," literary scholar Viktor 
Klemperer wrote in his Nazi-era diary. A forthcoming book quotes that 
passage to explain how long-standing prejudice was mobilized as engine 
and rationale for mass murder and state terrorism in Germany.

"Anti-Semitism was not only a set of prejudices and hatreds but also an 
explanatory framework for historical events," Jeffrey Herf writes in 
"The Jewish Enemy." He demonstrates that while Hitler was convincing 
Germans that the Jews were about to annihilate them, the numbers and 
influence of Jews in Germany were sharply declining. Facts did not get 
in Hitler's way.

A vehement counter-ideology is developing across the Arab world today to 
President Bush's drive to put America even more at the center of 
democratic change and material progress in that region. Some of the 
reaction is reasoned and pragmatic; much of it veers into hate 
propaganda that confounds nationality with race.

That suggests two initial propositions for an ongoing discussion of this 
vast subject:

The Bush administration must avoid throwing gasoline on this raging fire 
by making assertive declarations about preemptive warfare, or God's 
gifts of democracy being distributed to Arabs by Americans or the like. 
It must show that misbehavior or crimes in Iraq or elsewhere will be 
punished up to the highest level of responsibility.

Second, Americans need to recognize that the problems we face in the 
Middle East are bigger than the failings or mistakes of Bush & Co. Those 
problems would not fade quickly if U.S. troops left Iraq tomorrow. 
Repairing America's image at home and abroad is also a complex, 
generational task that begins now.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401715.html
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