Like most Australians, I was appalled by the pictures of Palestinians celebrating the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. But considering how sections of the Western intelligentsia have responded to the barbarous events of September 11, I will grudgingly acknowledge that at least there was an infantile honesty about the Palestinians' malevolence.
No serious commentator in a Western country could ever openly condone the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people. So feelings of satisfaction about the devastation inflicted on the symbols of US financial and military power have to be expressed deviously; by attempting to place the attacks in a "perspective" which shifts much of the blame onto America itself. Many intellectuals are acting like the old misogynist judge who says that while rape is a serious offence, the attractive victim must have been asking for it.
John Pilger, expatriate Australian author and darling of the ABC, claimed that the greatest source of terror in the world was the United States, a "fact" supposedly "censored from the Western media". Warming to his theme, he charged America with untrammelled brutality and greed in defending "power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade".
The real wonder, according to Pilger, was "how patient the oppressed have been", because it has taken so long to form suicide squads that would bring home to American the horrors that they themselves have created in faraway places. True, he did call the attacks on America "atrocities", but this seems to have been only a sop to his more sensitive readers. His heart was clearly with the Palestinians cheering in the streets.
Of course, Pilger is renowned for his talent in staking out the most demented niches of public discussion. But the letters pages of some newspapers suggest that his kind of thinking has permeated much more widely than decency and good sense might lead us to hope.
For instance, obviously peeved by an editorial in The Australian that stated "we have witnessed one of the greatest crimes against humanity", Dr Anthony Langlois from Flinders University responded that America and the West were daily involved in crimes of greater magnitude against the rest of the world.
Certainly Dr Langlois, a politics lecturer who specialises in human rights, did not resile from calling the attacks a "moral outrage". Nevertheless, he claimed that the kind of mind that would inflict such awful harm "is not dissimilar to our own".
According to this prize-winning academic, this is because "every day more people die because of Western policy and our consumption culture than died in the terrorist attacks". In other words, if you intend to get some fast food over the weekend, or plan to go shopping for electronic gadgets, you are little different from Osama bin Laden and his murderous crew. Perhaps you should give yourself up to the FBI now, before you cause any more devastation.
The notion that the wealth of the West is built on the exploitation and suffering of the Third World should have died a dishonourable death with the obvious economic failures of communism and related doctrines. Despite what many intellectuals believe, capitalism and its beneficiaries do best when world prosperity is widespread and increasing.
The barriers to greater prosperity in Third World countries do not stem from "free trade" or the economic system favoured by America. Rather, they result from the kind of protectionism advocated by Pilger and his fellow travellers in the anti-globalisation movement, as well as local cultural and institutional shortcomings which hinder initiative and the creation of enterprises that can operate successfully within the rule of law.
It is unlikely that anti-Americans in Australia and other countries will change their prejudices as a result of the terrorist attacks. But within the United States itself there may well be a reassessment of the view prevalent amongst the progressive elites and the anti-Vietnam War generation that America and its institutions are a major source of wickedness.
For the past three decades American security and investigative agencies such as the CIA and FBI have been demonised and undermined, usually by the very people who now complain about the "intelligence failures" that allowed the attacks to proceed without detection. There has been a corresponding tendency to forgive, and even celebrate, the homicidal New Left radicals who once participated in domestic terrorism, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.
Indeed, in what is a truly awful and revealing irony, on the morning of September 11 the liberal New York Times published a sympathetic story about ex-fugitives Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, two former leaders of the Weather Underground. Titled "No regrets for a love of explosives", it was designed to promote the just-published memoirs of Ayers, who is now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. Dorhn is the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University and a prominent figure in the American Bar Association.
In 1972, the couple were involved in bombing the Pentagon, though mercifully no lives were lost. The New York Times article began with Ayers saying "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough". "Enough" was done within a few hours of the story's publication, with Osama bin Laden's fanatics completing the Weather Underground's project. As America reflects on the terrible events of September 11, it will have to consider why its major universities and other institutions have been so willing to reward unrepentant domestic terrorists from the New Left.
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