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• Tuesday, January 6, 2009 06:59 AM

  “… one does not get to choose one's enemies ……?

  But one’s own actions may certainly encourage them, as I think you go on to admit: “more and more Muslims are turning to religious radicalism. Israel knows this story only too well because it helped create it”. If there is one common quality shared by Israel and the United States, as the rest of the world sees it, it’s a sort of national infantilism where it’s always someone else’s fault without a glimmer of self-examination. Americans wander around Europe piteously complaining that no-one likes them without bothering to lower their voices to complain about anything that doesn’t suit or flatter them while declining to understand whatever they’re trampling over because it’s not what they’re used to “at home”. At best, they’re a subject of near-universal mockery; at worst they’re genuinely ill-treated and robbed on the principle that it serves them right. The greater part of the world despises or hates Americans, not because they’re all necessarily bad, but because to ordinary eyes they mostly appear so stupid, uncivilised and insensitive. And one may also ask, since generally mild national or ‘racist’ antipathies are as old as time, why the bloated expression ‘anti-Semitic’ or even anti-American should apparently carry more significance than, say anti-Arabism or anti-anything else. If naïve and self-righteous feelings are expressed with too much vain conviction it’s hardly surprising that they might be returned, and yes, with vengeance.

  —brodski Read brodski's other letters
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