Terrorism's fellow travelers bash the U.S.

• Author: Lindsey, Brink
• Position: American Thought - Anti-American Americans after September 11

MODERN LIBERAL societies frequently are derided for their lack of "social cohesion." In the wake of Sept. 11, the baselessness of those criticisms should be obvious. Although solidarity in freedom may not be uppermost in the mind amidst the diverting luxuries of peacetime, its presence became palpable as soon as liberty came under attack.

The heroism of Flight 93's doomed passengers and of the firefighters and police officers who rushed into burning buildings; the enormous outpouring of aid and assistance for the victims; the immediate insistence, from the President on down, that there be no reprisals or bigotry directed against Muslim-Americans; the electrifying resurgence of patriotism here at home; and the tears and prayers of freedom-loving people around the world all confirm that the promise of e pluribus unum remains alive and well.

On the far political fringes, though, are voices that call out from beyond the pale of liberal fellow feeling. Adding obscene insult to grievous injury, those voices responded to the horror of Sept. 11 by blaming the victims--by contending, explicitly or implicitly, that America had it coming. So, while the terrorist attacks served to draw most of us closer together, they simultaneously exposed the unbridgeable differences between us and a disaffected minority of extremists.

Most of the America-haters flushed out by Sept. 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum. It is true that, from the far fight, Jerry Falwell did rush to ascribe the mass murder of innocents to divine wrath against his political opponents, while Pat Robertson nodded in warm assent, but that episode was exceptional. Moreover, Falwell and Robertson were blasted even by their supporters and forced almost immediately to recant. The left, on the other hand, produced a steady drumbeat of America-bashing tirades, and retractions have been few and far between.

"America, America, what did you do--either intentionally or unintentionally--in the world order, in Central America, in Africa where bombs are still blasting?," thundered former San Francisco supervisor Amos Brown at, of all places, a memorial service for victims of the terrorist attacks. "America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up? Ohhhh--America, what did you do?"

Author Susan Sontag reacted, not with Brown's stage anguish, but with outfight contempt. "The disconnect between [Sept. 11's] monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outfight deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing," she wrote in the New Yorker. "The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. 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?"

"This was not an `attack on Freedom,'" chimed in Gar Smith, president of the environmentalist Earth Island Institute. "It was a politically targeted attack on the core structures of the U.S. military and the U.S.-dominated global financial structure."

The antiglobalization group Anti-Capitalist Convergence, which led "peace" protests in Washington at the end of...