Nerd Mentality

'Death to US': Anti-Americanism examined
The US is perceived by many as an international bully, a modern day imperial power. At this critical moment in history, Washington correspondent Justin Webb challenges that idea. He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to Cairo, Caracas and Washington but it begins where anti-Americanism began - in Paris.







In the Abbey Churchyard in the lovely English city of Bath, groups of demonstrators, many - though not all - of them Quakers, regularly gather to protest against the iniquities of the world. My dear mother Gloria Webb, who died last year, was one of the protesters. In her day, she was an energetic duffle-coated figure who wanted to ban the bomb, stop wars of all kinds and suffering anywhere.

She was a wonderful person, my mum, and so were her friends. Yet it always struck me, when she told me about these protests (and when, I freely confess, I attended them with enthusiasm as a youngster) that there was an odd one-sidedness to the game.

The protests against nuclear weapons, for instance, concentrated on American weapons. The anti-war rallies were against American-led wars. The anti death penalty campaign focused on Texas.

A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion - or to magnify those indiscretions - while leaving the murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched.

In the beginning

And if anti-Americanism is alive and well among surprisingly mild-mannered people in Britain - how much more virulent must it be in tougher parts of the world?




To find out, I have visited Venezuela, where the nation's leader Hugo Chavez compares George W Bush to Hitler, and Egypt, where the regime warns of a tide of stars and stripes burning if its hold on power is weakened. And Paris. Paris? Yes Paris - where it all began.

Anti-Americanism was born in France. And here's a fascinating fact: it was born well before the United States existed. It was not caused by Coca-Cola, or McDonald's, or Hollywood or George W Bush.

The prevailing view among French academics throughout the 18th Century was that the New World was ghastly. It stank, it was too humid for life to prosper. And, as one European biologist put it: "Everything found there is degenerate or monstrous."

In their heart of hearts, many French people still believe that to be true.

A French intellectual once compared the United States with Belgium. Wounding. But you see what he meant: the French capital has a grandeur about it that demands attention on the world stage. Belgium does not, nor does most of America.

Washington is grand but Washington was designed by a Frenchman and his vision didn't fit the rest of the nation. America is ordinary. Go on say it out loud on the streets of Paris: "America is ordinary". It celebrates the pursuit of small-scale happiness - in families and communities - and that is what the anti-Americans can't stand.

Dislike

In the heart of Paris, there is the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, the man who helped defeat Nazi Germany and liberate Parisian streets, is celebrated here. And the point many French people make is that they would celebrate George W Bush, too, if they agreed with him. The source of anti-Americanism is plain they say. As one interviewee told us: "It's the policies, Stupid."




Well up to a point: in Paris there is plenty of evidence to be found that anti-Americanism is way more than that, that it's not simply reasonable opposition to the things America does. The kind of anti-Americanism fostered by French intellectuals down the centuries revolves around intense dislike of what America is - not what it does .

Sitting in the Cafe de Flore, in the very seat where Jean-Paul Sartre once held sway, the self-described writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy puts it like this: America became the nightmare that French right-wing intellectuals long feared, a nation built not on respectable ties of blood and tradition but on the self-conscious desire to create something new.

Antagonism

Levy is sympathetic to the US, and a book he wrote on his travels there, American Vertigo, is a balanced and thoughtful piece of work.

But such balance is, according to Levy, missing in the French political debate on American power and American life. He describes a process whereby this antagonism to the fundamentals of the USA - to the kind of democracy that celebrates and encourages ordinariness - migrates hither and thither in the French body politic.

It began on the right but now in the shape of Jose Bove (the anti-McDonald's campaigner, and presidential candidate) and other luminaries of the left, it lives on.

And this is not a recent migration brought on by Mr Bush. In May 1944 (just weeks before American GIs landed on the beaches of Normandy), Hubert Beuve-Mery, the founder of Le Monde newspaper - certainly no mouthpiece of the right - wrote this: "The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may - in time - threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of Liberty but they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitude which their capitalism has created. "

It is time that we understood that this attitude, this contempt for what democracy can do, is at the heart of at least some of the anti-Americanism we see in the world today.

"Death to America": Anti-Americanism examined will be broadcast on Radio 4 over three weeks starting on 16 April at 2000 BST.






Justin Webb will also answer your questions about his trip and Anti-Americanism. Send him your questions using the form below.




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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6547881.stm

Published: 2007/04/12 10:55:28 GMT

© BBC MMVII

I found this to be an interesting read. (I'll try and follow this up by posting the next two articles in the future.)

I agree with the article on some points, like the main point (or what I perceived it to be), anti-Americanism used as a cover for other hatreds, but I disagree on others.

Discuss?
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Batist - The Frenchy formerly known as Majinbuu -

... and Knight of Cydonia. die. just die. die in a hellpit of fire from satan's ass.

Batist - The Frenchy formerly known as Majinbuu -

... and Knight of Cydonia. die. just die. die in a hellpit of fire from satan's ass.

ITrustYouToKillMe

The French, lol. Can't wait for them to raise the white flag again when the extreme muslims in the ghettos of France will slowly start to go on a violent rampage.

Did MrSnuggles have a kid or something?
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Xbox LIVE gamertagPSN id: DrSquigglyPants

ITrustYouToKillMe

The French, lol. Can't wait for them to raise the white flag again when the extreme muslims in the ghettos of France will slowly start to go on a violent rampage.

The rampage started a long time ago.
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France warned CIA of hijack plot in 2001

By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer 31 minutes ago

PARIS - Nine months before al-Qaida slammed airliners into the World Trade Center, French intelligence suspected the terror network was plotting a hijacking — possibly involving a U.S. airline — and warned the
CIA, former French intelligence officials said Monday.
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But the French warning hinted at a plot in Europe, not the United States, and there was no suggestion of suicide attacks or multiple planes. One former official said al-Qaida may have leaked misinformation to divert intelligence agencies from the bigger, deadlier plot to come on Sept. 11, 2001.

The warning was another example of how intelligence agents sensed al-Qaida was hard at work in the months leading up to Sept. 11 but were unable to piece together fragmented warnings into a coherent plot.

Le Monde first reported the story Monday as it published excerpts of 328 pages of classified documents from France's main foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. One note, dated Jan. 5, 2001, reported that al-Qaida was plotting a hijacking.

Details were vague.

"It wasn't about a specific airline or a specific day, it was not a precise plot," Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, the former chief of staff for the agency's director, told The Associated Press. "It was a note that said, 'They are preparing a plot to hijack an airplane, and they have cited several companies.'"

Le Monde printed a copy of part of the note. In early 2000 in Kabul,
Afghanistan,
Osama bin Laden met with Taliban leaders and armed groups from
Chechnya and discussed the possibility of hijacking a plane after takeoff in Frankfurt, Germany, the note said, citing Uzbek intelligence.

The note listed potential targets: American, Delta, Continental, and United airlines, Air France and Lufthansa. The list also mentioned a "US Aero," but it was unclear exactly what that referred to.

Two of the carriers, United and American, were targeted on Sept. 11.

CIA spokesman George Little said Le Monde's article "merely repeats what the U.S. government knew and reported before Sept. 11 — that al-Qaida was interested in airliner plots, especially hijackings."

"The article does not suggest that U.S. or foreign officials had advance knowledge of the details surrounding the Sept. 11 plot," he said. "Had the details been known, the U.S. government would have acted on them."

The Sept. 11 Commission and a joint congressional inquiry into the attacks have described vague warnings of potential threats in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

The 9/11 commission said that, as the year began, the CIA started receiving "frequent but fragmentary" threat reports. Among other warnings, the intelligence community sent out a March 2001 terror threat advisory about a heightened threat of Sunni extremist attacks against U.S. facilities, personnel and other interests.

During that investigation George Tenet, CIA director at the time, told the commission that "the system was blinking red."

"Everyone knew that something was cooking, that these people were preparing something big and spectacular," Alain Chouet, former chief of the security intelligence service at the DGSE, told AP. "Our American colleagues knew, our European colleagues knew, everyone did. But nobody had a hint it would happen inside the United States — on the contrary."

The DGSE drew up nine reports about al-Qaida threats to U.S. interests in the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Le Monde said. The agency gained experience fighting Islamist terrorism when Algerian insurgents set off deadly bombs in Paris in the mid-1990s.

The Sept. 11 Commission report mentions a 1994 Algerian plot with chilling similarities to Sept. 11 — the hijacking of an Air France flight by Algerian militants who threatened to blow it up over the Eiffel Tower. The hijackers were killed when French commandos stormed the plane.

Before drafting the January 2001 notice, the DGSE was tipped off by Uzbek intelligence. Chouet said Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord from the Uzbek community who was fighting the Taliban, had sent his men to infiltrate al-Qaida camps. Their information was passed to Western intelligence officials. Today, Dostum is chief of staff of the Afghan army.

The French certainly passed the note along to the CIA, Chouet said.

"We transmitted everything to our American counterparts, everything that could have posed a threat, and they did the same with us," Chouet said.

He suggested details of the plot — such as the European setting — may have been leaked by al-Qaida to confuse intelligence services. It would not be the first time, he said.

An alleged bin Laden associate named Djamel Beghal was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Investigators suspected he was the ringleader of a plot to send a suicide bomber into the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

Chouet says he has concluded that plot was a fake — "part of a misinformation operation by al-Qaida."

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The Dragons are Gone!