PAUL HOLLANDER
17
humiliations, the exploitation and the purposeful genocide taking place
in Palestine." This same politician also had suggested that Israeli capi–
talists investing in shopping malls were not merely interested in profit,
but wished to inject alien cultural influences into Hungarian life.
Another Hungarian commentator put his finger on the anti-American
sentiments and ambivalence coloring the responses of some of his fellow
countrymen:
Those who believe that this was the day when justice was done cry
with one eye and laugh with the other...This was payment for Hol–
lywood, for chewing gum, Vietnam and the malls. For globaliza–
tion that equals America. All those who demonized the
International Currency Fund, the World Bank, McDonalds and
Uncle Sam are now content...
Upon returning to America, I also found that this horrendous atrocity
could provide an occasion for giving new expression to a long simmer–
ing, intense, and gnawing hostility toward this society and everything it
stands for. This unprecedented outrage was seized upon by some to vent
hostility not seen since the Vietnam war. Predictably these sentiments and
attitudes were most pronounced on campuses and among academic intel–
lectuals.
The question most frequently-and almost gleefully-asked and all
too readily answered (by critics of the United States) was "Why do they
hate us?"
It
was taken for granted that if people hated the United States
they had to have sound, justifiable reasons which led to the regrettable,
but fully understandable mass murders. Often the same people were the
staunchest advocates of hate crime legislation (when the victims were
women, homosexuals, or other minorities) with no questions asked
about the "root causes" of such despicable behavior or about the ways
the victims might have brought these misfortunes upon themselves.
In
such instances it was either tacitly acknowledged or vocally asserted that
hate crimes are pathologies which need to be punished without mercy
and without any consideration of extenuating social circumstances.
Not so when it came to the events of September
I
rrh.
In
its aftermath
the search was on for "root causes," for "understanding" the terrorists
and their actions. Attention and responsibility was shifted from victim–
izer to victim.
The common thread running through the critiques of the U.S. was the
notion of moral equivalence many of the same people used earlier in
comparisons of the United States and the Soviet Union. Perhaps the
