Blame America First

AMERICA is guilty. America is always guilty. Even when it’s attacked. So it appears, at least, to a certain type of commentator. When the Towers fell, when the Pentagon was pierced, when thousands of our countrymen were slaughtered—the America Last pundits were there to explain how we had brought these calamities on ourselves. We were attacked, they explained, because we had angered the world. Had we not walked out of the Durban conference? Had we not spurned the Kyoto Protocol? Osama bin Laden, environmentalist in a hurry.

What has drawn the most fire, of course, is America’s alliance with Israel. Critics of that alliance, on both the left and the right, have argued that but for it we would never have been attacked. The bluntest statements have appeared in the British press. In an article for the Observer called “Who Will Dare Damn Israel?” Richard Ingrams wrote that “the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster [is] that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony.” Also in the Observer, Edward Said blamed America’s “support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.” Similar views, more obliquely expressed, have appeared in the American media.

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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AMERICA is guilty. America is always guilty. Even when it’s attacked. So it appears, at least, to a certain type of commentator. When the Towers fell, when the Pentagon was pierced, when thousands of our countrymen were slaughtered—the America Last pundits were there to explain how we had brought these calamities on ourselves. We were attacked, they explained, because we had angered the world. Had we not walked out of the Durban conference? Had we not spurned the Kyoto Protocol? Osama bin Laden, environmentalist in a hurry.

What has drawn the most fire, of course, is America’s alliance with Israel. Critics of that alliance, on both the left and the right, have argued that but for it we would never have been attacked. The bluntest statements have appeared in the British press. In an article for the Observer called “Who Will Dare Damn Israel?” Richard Ingrams wrote that “the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster [is] that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony.” Also in the Observer, Edward Said blamed America’s “support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.” Similar views, more obliquely expressed, have appeared in the American media.