Thursday, July 31, 2003
New York Daily News: Here's something to raise your hackles: Nearly one-third of Germans younger than 30 harbor suspicions that the U.S. government orchestrated Sept. 11, the better to justify imperial adventures abroad. This is according to a poll freshly conducted by the German weekly Die Zeit. Sad, though not really so surprising considering that Europe is full of sullen young neo-radicals, reared from the cradle to mistrust America in the great global game.
For that matter, many thousands of U.S. students are daily getting their brains washed by crackpot professors who also think the White House ordered Sept. 11 in sinister collusion with, oh, you know, the oil interests, the military-industrial complex, Emperor Ming of the Planet Mongo, the usual bunch. Rampant runs the disbelief that we could ever possibly be the good guys.
Brothers Hussein
Speaking of disbelievers: Though it is gratifying to behold the photographs of the Brothers Hussein lying there all peaceful and serene, many Iraqis are still far from convinced that Udai and Qusai have really and truly had their rotten souls blown to hell. Snapshots simply may not be sufficiently persuasive here, particularly given the fact that these two guys look not unlike thousands of other bearded Iraqis.
"We will believe they are dead when their bodies are tied to cars and dragged through the streets," one Baghdad citizen told Reuters.
In a brutal culture like Iraq's, such demands do not shock. It is not the American way -- Donald Rumsfeld is not going to hold up one of Udai's ears at a news conference -- but perhaps it is necessary to display the corpses, not photographs.
As for the twentysomething Germans, ranting in blind conspiratorial rote at anything American, they might usefully consider court testimony taken in Dusseldorf. A Jordanian named Shadi Mohammed Mustafa Abdalla, an admitted onetime Osama bin Laden bodyguard, confessed to plotting grenade attacks across Germany. Among the targets: discos -- full of radical young Germans all earnestly agreeing that the U.S. government was behind Sept. 11.