350
PARTISAN REVIEW
species, we laughed-laughed in easy self-mockery, and laughed, too, in
celebration of the ability and opportunity we had been given to grow
beyond the limits of our own native cultures.
From the other classes we never heard the sound of laughter.
"IF
YOU'RE NOT WITH US, YOU'RE AGAINST US,"
said President Bush
soberly in the wake of September
I I.
Some European Muslims made it
clear they were with us; some made it clear they were not. Faisal Bodi,
the same writer who complained in the
Guardian
in
I999
about
women's shelters, returned to the pages of that newspaper on October
I7,
reporting with approval that since September
II
his imam had
offered up Friday prayers "imploring God to annihilate Islam's enemies,
to 'rock the ground underneath their feet.'" Here in Norway, a child
counselor talked on national TV about a grade-school class he had vis–
ited in order to discuss the atrocities. All the children were upset, he
said, except for one little Muslim boy who was sincerely puzzled by his
classmates' reactions-at his home, the boy explained, everybody was
celebrating.
Aftenposten
reported on a Palestinian who stood with his
young son outside the U.S. Embassy in Oslo and cheered the attacks–
shouting "This is a great day!"-until the police led him off. I wasn't
shocked to read that this Palestinian (even though claiming membership
in Hizballah) was not taken into custody, just removed from the
Embassy area . Nor did the Norwegian authorities, I'm sure, pay a visit
to the celebrating family of that puzzled schoolboy. And has the British
immigration service, one wonders, examined Faisal Bodi's visa status?
Or his imam's? One rather doubts it.
Yet since September
II,
the winds seem to have begun to shift-in
some places, anyway. In the Netherlands, it wasn't just the horrors of
the terrorist attacks on the U.S. that caused the blinders to fall from
many people's eyes. In early
200I,
the imam of Rotterdam had made
antigay remarks whose viciousness stunned the Dutch. (Most Dutchmen
had fooled themselves into thinking their country was past such ugli–
ness.) On the day the World Trade Center fell, the Dutch populace
learned that Moroccan immigrants in the town of Ede were rejoicing in
the streets. That Friday, a TV report on Nederland
I
commemorating
the victims in the U.S. was followed immediately by a Koran reading,
supplied by the Dutch Muslim Broadcasting System, stating that "unbe–
lievers were fuel for the fire." Finally, in a post-attack survey of Moroc–
can immigrants in the Netherlands,
2I
percent openly admitted their
support for an anti-American holy war. (A similar Sunday
Times
poll,
