22
PARTISAN REVIEW
their retaliatory blow by using the kind of Christian neighborly love inher–
ent to the Europeans and, naturally, the Germans
(alttestamentarisch
being a frequently used adjective pejoratively describing America's puta–
tive reactions and very essence, a euphemistic term for Jewish and
Judaized). The attack was often portrayed as the long-overdue payback
for Dresden and Hiroshima. One even heard and read that this outrage
was a staged catastrophe, like Pearl Harbor, or that it was yet another
well-disguised act by Israel's omnipotent Mossad
to
involve America
even more on the side of the Israelis and deliver the final blow
to
the
Palestinians. Unfortunately it very quickly became apparent again how
much the German Left and Right resemble each other ideologically and
normatively whenever the point in question is America and-indirectly,
of course-Jews. For the Left-which has steadfastly denied ever being
anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist-the United States remains the
source of all evil : crude, capitalist, inauthentic, bullying, and the scourge
of the Third World, the Arab countries in particular. For the Right,
America is so despised that its otherwise never-concealed racism against
Arabs and Muslims (in Germany, mostly Turks) fades into the back–
ground, so that its full blast can be concentrated on the Americans and,
of course, Jews. As in the Kosovo War, the German Right's standard ani–
mosities-in that case against the Serbs, a long-held enemy for the Ger–
man Right that has traditionally supported Croatian fascists against the
Serbs, and now Arabs and other adherents of Islam against whom the
German Right has inveighed for decades-receded in favor of an even
greater enemy: the United States and-of course-Israel and the Jews.
Anti-Americanism has always been the more high-minded and socially
acceptable form of anti-Semitism in Germany and all of Europe. Unfor–
tunately it is clear that, not just for Germans on the extreme margins of
the political spectrum, Americans are simply illegitimate and unaccept–
able as victims.
It
is unclear what calamity would render them sympa–
thetic, but the events of September
I
rrh clearly did not. Opinions such
as those voiced by Germany's most respected television journalist Ulrich
Wickert, that Osama bin Laden's and George W. Bush's respective
frames of mind are basically identical, were not so aberrant from what
many Germans voiced
satta voce
in private and
to
their friends. The
noted radio journalist Gabriele Gillen all but rejoiced in the events of
September
I
rrh when, in her commentary of September 14th, she made
it clear that she did not perceive the terrorist attacks on New York as an
attack on her own moral construct or as an attack on the values of
democracy since the United States was not a democracy, and that despite
all the clamoring that these attacks had changed the world, they did no
