Kumbaya Watch: More Anti-Americanism
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 3, 2001 3:20 p.m.

or those who imagine that anti-American posturings are confined, among Europeans, to the venomous British press, the Talk of the Town in this week's New Yorker (the heart of Sontag-land, no less) offers a depressing postcard from France. Writes Richard Brody, "At noon on Friday, September 14th, France joined the rest of Europe in observing three minutes of silence in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York. It proved to be the noisiest three minutes of silence imaginable. In the center of Montparnasse, trucks and motorcycles blazed and blared through the intersection; horns honked; people talked on their cell phones; waiters shouted through the noontime rush at cafes." Meanwhile, members of the Communist Party gathered to gripe that there had been no moment of silence "for the victims of American crimes, for the Vietnamese children who were napalmed ... [or] for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or for those of the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila." (Or for the countless millions slaughtered by Communism — but never mind them.)

Notes Brody, "the reluctance to pause over the American catastrophe would be insignificant if it had been limited to a meeting of political marginals, but that was not quite the case." He cites a story in Le Monde "on the 'American extreme right,' which warned readers that it was still possible that white supremacists had been behind the hijackings," and an editorial from the same paper in which an academic from the National Center for Scientific Research asked her readers to consider "who profits from the crime? The Palestinians? Of course not. The Afghans? . . . The poor? The oppressed? Of course not. . . . Those who come out more arrogant and stronger than ever are Bush, Putin, and Sharon. What a success!" Meanwhile, "four of the eleven candidates competing for the French Presidency — three on the far left, and one, Jean-Marie Le Pen, on the far right — told the local press that the United States essentially had itself to blame for the attacks."

And as for the man on the boulevard, well, Brody reports that "the French men and women I talked with — cartoonists, computer programmers, professors — often joined their words of concern to critiques of American policy. The critiques were familiar, but the tone and the point were now hard to take. Over baklava and sweet mint tea at a cafe outside a mosque, friends of mine from Iran and Algeria, who knew at first hand the agonies of war, warmly expressed sympathy and asked me for news of my family in Manhattan. As I began to answer, a French filmmaker at the table cut me off to complain that, with all the talk about the Twin Towers, everyone forgets about Bhopal."

Still, amid all the predictable blame-America-first sentiment, Brody does find a glimmer of sanity. Returning to the pages of Le Monde, he uncovers an editorial penned by two old-guard Lefties, veterans of the Parisian upheavals of the 1960s. They write: "The master terrorist has no conditions. He wants our unconditional surrender. He wants our enslavement." With this in mind, "we must avoid justifying" their crimes, and recognize that America's flaws are beside the point, since "the nihilist offensive follows its own logic." In closing, Brody reports, the authors discuss the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, who fought the hijackers and brought down their plane before it could reach Washington. "Nihilism," they conclude, "is not invincible." Even, mercifully, among the French.