"The fact is that the LEFT hates us for our wealth, our success, our power. They hate us into incoherence. The LEFT, Ajami astutely observes, disdain us for our excessive religiosity (manifest, they imagine, by evolution being expelled from schools while prayer is ushered back in).
We cannot win for losing. We are widely reviled by the LEFT as enemies of the third world, yet in the 1990s we engaged three times in combat — in the Persian Gulf and in the Balkans — to rescue Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, third world peoples all. And in the last two cases, there was nothing in it for the U.S.; it was humanitarianism and good international citizenship of the highest order.
The search for logic in anti-Americanism is fruitless. It is in the air the LEFT breathes. Its roots are envy and self-loathing — by peoples who, yearning for modernity but having failed at it, find their one satisfaction in despising modernity's great exemplar.
On Sept. 11, they gave it a rest for a day. Big deal."