"They Hate Us." "We Had it Coming." There has been no shortage of poorly worded
responses to the events of Sept. 11, but none, perhaps, is as pernicious
or offensive as that sentiment spoken by everyone from Martin Amis to Robert Fisk to
Susan Sontag, the sentiment that says, in effect, we deserved it.
There have been, of course, other equally ludicrous responses. Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson blaming the tragedy on gays and feminists. David Horowitz blaming it on his
former leftist fellow travelers. But Falwell and Robertson are merely up to their
usual foot-in-mouth antics and Horowitz, as always, is using the events to publicize
his narrow-minded anti-liberal crusade. As such, we can safely ignore them.
But Sontag, Fisk and others are not so easily dismissed. After all, they are
intelligent, worldly people, not generally known as blowhards or opportunists. And
their message is disarming at the same time as it is disdaining — "You, America, do
not understand the world, and so do not know why someone would want to do this. But
we do." The attack, many have written, was a reaction to American greed, to American
capitalist expansion, to our support for Israel and our sanctions against Iraq. Fisk
wrote in The Nation that:
But this is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be
asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing into
Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in
1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese
militia — paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally — hacking and raping and
murdering their way through refugee camps.
And Sontag, writing in The New Yorker, said:
Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization'
or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-
proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and
actions?
On the surface, these statements are simplistic in the extreme — the hijackers killed
thousands of Americans because they did not like the United States. But taken further,
the articles reek of the same generalizations and opportunistic stereotypes they
accuse "Americans" of tossing around, the sort of logic they claim led directly to the
attack. Beyond the ludicrous image of Sontag, warm in her Manhattan home, claiming to
speak for the world's oppressed, these authors imagine a great, huddled mass
of nations with a common, deep hatred of the United States, each with its own grievance
but united in a desire to lash out. Or, as one comment on the Weblog Metafilter said,
If we continue to treat the third world as little more than a sweat shop to produce
cheap oil and Nikes for us then it shouldn't come as much of a surprise when they get
angry about this.
The implication being, of course, that the United States is an oppressor state,
draining resources and happiness from the rest of the world, and that the oppressed
have now cashed in their debts, that the terrorists were doing more than expressing
their own anger — they were attacking the Great Satan in the name of a great
"They."
But there is no "They." "They" do not hate us, because "they" do not exist.
There is no "world" against which the United States is opposed, and even if there were,
it is ridiculous to imply, as Fisk does, that the terrorists were acting on "their"
behalf. For every American-flag-burning Palestinian there are dozens in Gaza City and
the West Bank who wept and prayed for the victims, and there are an equal number who
look to the United States as the only nation capable of solving their plight. The "Arab
world" does not think ill of America because the "Arab world" does not "think" anything.
Rather, each Arab thinks for him or herself, and for Fisk to presuppose that the
hijackers were speaking in their collective name is dangerously close to the boorish
stereotyping he claims to abhor.
In the wake of any tragedy, the first victim is common sense, and in that vein Fisk, Sontag
and others are no more culpable than those who call for bombing Afghanistan "back to
the Stone Age," innocents be damned. We all want explanations, and in the rush to
explain it is all too easy to forget that the world elides all judgment, that there
is never an easy explanation for what happened.
E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.
"They Hate Us"?