In the heyday of anti-Semitism, Jews often found themselves sinking into a logical quicksand. They would try to combat prejudice with reason, which makes intuitive sense. For if hatred rests upon irrationality, then the cure ought to be a healthy dose of rationality. In fact, an orderly mind can be a handicap when defending against such accusations as the persistent slander that Jews were simultaneously communists and a secret cabal of international financiers.
A reasonable person would respond that the charge makes no sense: Communists are out to destroy capitalism, while financiers depend on that system to make them rich. Yet anti-Semites somehow could picture Baron Rothschild, the banker, sitting down to conspire with Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary. The prejudiced mind has no problem with mutually contradictory ideas. Such hatreds stem from an emotional, all-encompassing bill of charges–a proposition worth keeping in mind as Americans ask themselves why our country was chosen for the deadly terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
As a logical people, we’d like to think there was some specific reason for that tragedy, however perverse. But the root fact is that the terrorists don’t hate us just because of our diplomatic policies, as some think, or because our military bases in Saudi Arabia might seem to profane Muslim holy places, as others suggest.
The bin Ladens of the world hate us simply because we are Americans.
It is tough for us to come to grips with that. Americans are friendly folk. We’re quick with a handshake when encountering strangers. We believe in a society of law and order. If we run a red light, write us a ticket, we’ll pay the fine.
But the idea of being under a Kafkaesque indictment for unspecified crimes throws us.
So it might be helpful to consider the following analogy: Anti-Americanism is the anti-Semitism of the 21st Century.
Like the latter, anti-Americanism is a form of odium as intense as it is irrational.
It is also not limited to a few terrorist training camps in the mountains of Afghanistan. It exists in many other places, too, albeit in milder form.
Even in Europe, people will think nothing of expressing anti-American sentiments right in the face of American friends.
I have, for example, an Italian friend, a well-traveled and educated woman. She is a doctor. A few years back, when the U.S. sent troops to Somalia to help distribute food in that starving nation, my Italian friend was convinced that America would never pull out its forces.
I tried reasoning with her, pointing out that twice our country had come to the rescue of her country. But after both world wars, we brought our troops home. If we hadn’t seized the opportunity to make Italy and other highly developed European nations our colonies, why in the world would we want to do so in a poverty-stricken place like Somalia?
The argument went nowhere. My friend was operating off an impenetrable logic: Whatever America does must be wrong.
Decent or devil?
Behind such thinking lies an assumption that the U.S. is the devil incarnate of modern politics.
Having been tagged with the label, nothing we do is going to change the anti-American mind-set. Which is not to say that we have an unblemished record. We’ve supported some obnoxious regimes.
But we have also done some decent things, like rebuilding Europe after World War II with the Marshall Plan.
We even helped former enemies, Germany and Japan, get on their feet.
We’ve sent thousands of Americans, young and old, to needy countries around the world through the Peace Corps.
America has given asylum and the opportunity to rebuild their lives to refugees fleeing innumerable wars.
We might quibble about where the balance lies between the good and bad we’ve done but that kind of moral calculus is irrelevant to the anti-American mind.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, head of the Taliban, sent us a message last week explaining that Americans must understand they were targeted Sept. 11 as a “result of their government’s wrong policies.”
He felt no need to specify which policies justified the killing of more than 6,000 innocents.
To those who think that way, all our policies are wrong. When speaking of the devil, the assumption is that everything he touches is evil.
That way of thinking seems to be deeply embedded in the human psyche, for it is reflected in many religions.
Even monotheisms–such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam–posit some kind of anti-god. Without a Satan, a Beelzebub, or an Evil One, how else could the faithful understand the existence of evil in the world?
Explaining disasters
In past centuries, Jews served as a living image of that kind evil incarnate.
In a pre-scientific age, where the real reason for crop failures or pestilence was unknown, the emotional understanding of such disasters was simple–the Jews are at fault–from whence flowed the remedy of pogroms and Inquisitions.
Today we know the true causes of natural disasters. But in our contemporary world, there is an awful lot of evil needing to be explained.
Much of the Third World is controlled by dictators, morally and politically corrupt and sustained by force of arms. To put it bluntly, they don’t give a tinker’s damn for the well-being of their subjects.
In other places, government hardly exists. Anarchy rules, with the populace caught in the crossfire of rival armed bands.
Traditional societies are caught in a cultural bind: Trying to escape poverty, they’re tempted to mimic the prosperous West, which leaves them feeling guilty for having abandoned their own traditions.
Half a century ago, such problems could be attributed to colonialism, European domination of the world.
For a few decades after Europe’s colonies won their freedom, those problems could be explained as a continuing legacy of colonialism, the sustained force of injuries suffered under previous rulers. But we’re now too far removed from that experience for that explanation to be satisfactory. So another one has been coined for the world’s ills, which often are now attributed to a new kind of “cultural imperialism.”
A paradox
For that kind of easy answer, we’re sitting ducks.
American lifestyles have become the cultural coin of the realm through much of the world. Bluejeans are the ubiquitous uniform of the young–which puts us in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t bind. Other societies demonstrate their admiration for us by importing those bluejeans but then turn around and accuse us of subverting their native cultures.
We’re probably going to have to live with such paradoxes, and the anger they inspire against us, for some time. If the history of anti-Semitism is any guide, we are not going to be able to negotiate ourselves out of the terrorists’ gun sights by any change of policy or similar act. The German Jews tried just that, reasoning that if anti-Semites had a prejudiced image of the Jew, the best defense was to avoid it. So they assimilated. Yet that didn’t prevent Hitler from coming to power, in an enlightened country, on a little more than his promise to get the Jews.
We’ll make it
Still, even if there isn’t much we can do about it, we’ll make it through this season of anti-Americanism. We’ll be OK–provided we don’t let the hatred of others seep into our thinking too. Probably that won’t happen. Americans are slow to anger, quick to forgive.
Still, hatred can have a corrosive effect on those exposed to it. So whenever, under a barrage of anti-Americanism, we are tempted to return hatred in kind, it would be good to recall the advice of an ancient teacher. His example stands at the intersection of three great faiths that, praise be to God, live in peace in our country. He was born a Jew. Muslims consider him a great prophet, and to Christians, he was the messiah.
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,” Jesus said. “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who calumniate you.
