the quotes were taken out of context.
there a big difference between being pissed off about the flaws of a country you love, and saying so, and blaming America first.
Everyone that correctly comments that our decades of primarily selfish interference in the countries of the Middle East had something to do with the 9/11 attack seems to be accused of claiming America had it coming. Well, except Glenn Beck, who said essentially the same thing.
As a non American downunder I sometimes feel that to point out something like this I get the same reaction if I was to say that maybe just maybe Isreal is perfect.
What I mean is that if a weakness is pointed out it must be an attack and as such must be attacked as being anti American.
Perhaps in the same way that the Jews ought to have examined the causes of the hatred directed against them by e.g. the Nazis, as was one of Hannah Arent’s points if I remember correct. Sure it is fine as a way to understand ones enemy to better destroy him. But never a good reason to change anything about oneself. The problem is that suggesting that US policies cause others to react against you is often made as a suggestion that you must change US policies or indeed your whole way of life.
Why are you Americans so preoccupied with having people like you? It seems a peculiar wish much more important to Americans than to citizens of any other nation. Especially considering that you are too rich and powerful for it to ever happen.
Not the same thing at all.
:eek: I think the number of Americans who want to destroy the Middle East and the number of Middle Easterners who want to destroy America is, in each case, a microscopic proportion of the relevant polulations.
That is so wrong and so extreme and so arrogant and so downright inhuman that it sounds like something that an extreme sociopath or psychopath would say.
Because if people like you they are more likely to do business with you - on better terms.
Simple really.
Plus, no one wants to be hated - not anyone sane, anyway.
Ok. I’m convinced.
Where did that non sequitur come from? Who said anything about the Middle East or all the people of the Middle East? I was thinking France.
Ok.
The almighty dollar speaks and you follow. If your interests are mercantile, then you’ll get a better cost benefit by directing your advertisement resources towards the European or Asian markets, rather on for instance your Middle East which accounts for only a miniscule percentage of your trade.
Personally I don’t really care either way, if some poor sucker in some shithole hates my guts. He’s probably projecting far worse miseries and a pathetic existence onto an external enemy. His loss.
It doesn’t seem to take a lot to convince you of anything.
You posited the aphorism as a generality and the US has only been physically attacked by people from the Middle East recently so it’s not really a non sequitur.
Now, that really is a non sequitur.
To be quite honest, your feelings, at least as represented in this thread, are so out of kilter with the norm as to be not particularly relevant.
It’s not so much a matter of extremism - rather a somewhat disturbing attitude to human interactions.
You have
evidence that they were taken out of context, I assume? By the way, this piece makes him look more like a crazy, not like your typical lefty extremist who hates America… the CIA invented HIV and crack to eliminate blacks, etc.
There is a huge gap between saying that the 9/11 perpetrators did their thing because of American (rightous?) presence in the MidEast (and our support for Israel, I’m guessing), and saying that we were asking for it.
Wright’s 9/11 quote:
Yeah, I see your point. Clearly he doesn’t think 9/11 was our fault :rolleyes:
(For the record, he was quoting someone he saw on TV, Fox News of all places.)
I think the point is that some hatred of America is irrational, and cannot be fixed by changing our foreign or trade policies. bin Laden, for instance, attacked us because American soldiers set foot in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war. He wants us to convert to his brand of Islamo-fascist fundamentalism.
These are not requests that can be addressed. Therefore if someone says that attacks made because we drove Saddam out of Kuwait or because we trade stocks on the open market and have gay rights and are allied to Israel (cite) are in some sense our responsibility, then that begins to shade off into blaming America.
Regards,
Shodan
This is actually exactly the type of language that pops up in the search results I cited above.
Quotes from one person are used to smear another person or group of people.
Jeremiah Wright blames America for many things (some reasonable, some rather wack-a-doodle), and because he does Barack Obama hates his country. And it’s often phrased in exactly the sort of “gee shucks, I hope he didn’t catch the crazy” way.
John Kerry questions the reasons for going into Iraq and Dick Gephardt asks whether we are safer than we were before 9/11 and suddenly they are “blaming America” for wars we started…
It’s a weak argument, and it always has been. It’s a way to avoid dealing with the claims being made (whether they be reasonable, like Gephardt’s, or unreasonable, like Wright’s) by making the issue about America as a whole.
The third of your links is from Mother Jones magazine, not exactly a hotbed of the radical right. The article does castigate the left, but hardly from the position the OP decries. In fact, the article itself defends quite admirably the very thesis of the OP: that a reasoned and nuanced response is necessary.
It’s unclear to me, then, how it’s appearance at #3 can support the inference that “Blame America First” as a phrase is used by those doing what the OP inveighs against.
Yes, I was counting the Mother Jones link as one that was not an example of “Blame America First” as a knee-jerk response to liberals in general.
So, just from the first 5 links, 4 of the 5 were used that way. I’d say that makes it the “most common use” of the phrase. We can go further down the list if you’d like.
My contention is that “Blame America First” is most commonly used as a way to shut down legitimate debate. The fact that some people do, in fact, blame America first doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of liberals do not.
I’m sure you’d agree that accusing the person you are arguing with of hating their country is a rather unseemly ad hominem.
If you wish to acknowledge that “your side’s” favorite bogeyman actually has no perceptible influence on “our side”, who am I to argue? :dubious:
For the record, I agree. Questioning whether we’re safer before or after the wars were started (putting aside the question whether we actually started them or they did) is definitely not the same thing as saying that we deserved the terrorist attacks.
And your response is much better than the simple “he was quoted out of context” defense that we see here from time to time.
US foreign policy is rife with error, but I don’t think it’s true that if America hadn’t made these strategic errors they wouldn’t be such a terrorist target (if anyone’s suggesting that).
For one thing, to many america does symbolise a certain lifestyle. One of the most influencial pioneers of islamic jihad – Sayyid Qutb – was seemingly motivated by just hatred of Western ways.
Secondly, even when america does the right thing, they get it in the eye – e.g. Somalia, and to a large extent, Afghanistan.
Finally, people seem willing to believe anything when it comes to america. e.g. I have an Afghan friend that is certain that the US is in Afghanistan to steal the opium. Apparently he’s seen them load it on to planes and he knows for a fact it gets sold on to gangs.
So…IMO, sure, if America had no military and never intervened in any world affairs, it wouldn’t be so much of a target.
But if the US was as is but didn’t make mistakes like Iraq pt II, guantanamo…I think there would still be comparable levels of hatred.
That’s exactly what people are suggesting.
People aren’t going to fly themselves into buildings or finance people flying themselves into building just because they don’t like your lifestyle. It would be an absurd sacrifice.
The reason that there is so much hatred of the US from the Middle East is because it is perceived to be incredibly partisan in the way it treats the players there.
Particularly in that the US is a major supporter of Israel and does nothing about the fact that Israel is known to have atomic weapons and is in contravention of several UN resolutions without attracting any sanctions.
Yet let any Arab state even be suspected of having WMD and all hell breaks loose - with a great deal of loss of life.
It’s the ability of Americans to hold up their hands and say: “we’re doing nothing wrong and we’ve no intention of changing” whilst continuing to adopt such a partisan stance that causes such angst. Trying to pretend that its just some weird dislike of another culture is mind numbingly stupid.
bin Laden seems to have convinced nineteen or so people to do so nonetheless.
I think this is a bit disingenuous.
Terrorists don’t object merely to the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons - they object to her existence entirely, and want her to cease to exist. The fact that they got The Bomb merely pisses them off because it makes it that much more risky to make a direct attack against Israel. The hatred of her existence long predates her acquisition of nuclear weapons.
For the US to abandon Israel as an ally is another of those requests that cannot be accommodated. Those who hate Israel, as the terrorists do, and want to eliminate her, as the terrorists do, are going equally to hate any ally of Israel who refuses to abandon her to her fate.
In a sense, it is “blaming America first” to say that we incur any kind of responsibility for being attacked because we are committed to being a secular democracy, or because we intend for Israel to continue to exist, or because we assisted in the defense of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Because these are demands that are not only impossible but morally wrong to adopt. bin Laden wants us to force our women to wear burkhas and oppress homosexuals. That ain’t gonna happen, and if there were any chance that it would, it would be the moral duty of every decent person to resist it to the death or beyond.
Some people cannot be reasoned with or appeased. So, if you leave us alone, we will ignore you (to the extent possible).
If you don’t leave us alone, God help you.
Regards,
Shodan
I tend to criticize America first because, well, I’m an American citizen. I am in part responsible for what America does. I’m not responsible for for what France or Russia or Iran does.
From my POV as a politically active person, nations independent of the U.S. are just there, and do what they do regardless of what I say or don’t say, so why say anything - unless, of course, I can nudge the U.S.A. towards influencing the policies of those countries in a beneficial direction. But that involves changing the U.S.A. as an initial step.
Also, quite frankly, from a very early age I bought into the propaganda that our country was some sort of special, that we were the Good Guys in the world. I’ve become all too aware that that’s not true, but I still feel it should be true, and I should do what I can to demand that it become true.
What’s more, the flag-waving types generally agree with me that we’re the Good Guys. It’s just that many of them seem to mean it in a different sense - that our Goodness is simply a tribal thing: we’re Good because we’re Us, and that’s that. So the most heinous acts that defend and protect America are justifiable because they defend and protect America, and if I question that, then maybe I’m not really part of the tribe.
Bin Laden is laughing.
That’s a bit circular. You counter an assertion that people wouldn’t fly into buildings just because they didn’t like someone’s lifestyle by stating that it must be because some people flew some planes into some bulidings.
Sorry, that won’t wash.
It isn’t in the least disingenuous. Yes, they don’t want Israel there and, no, of course the West is not, as far as it’s able to prevent it, going to allow them to destroy Israel.
However, the fact that it’s basically one rule for Israel and one rule for the Arab states is something that is sufficient to actually cause them to take extreme measures.
Well, yes, they’re not going to be happy about it but the fact that the US uses two completely different rule books is what causes the extremists to gain ascendancy.
It is the fact that the US adopts disparate rules for Israel and the rest of the Arab states that is the problem, not simply the support of Israel.
Really?
Do you really think that he went to all that trouble to get the US to force women to wear burkhas and oppress homosexuals? :rolleyes:
And God bless the victims of 9-11 who paid the price for America’s lop sided treatment of the Middle East. 
I am going by what Obama said.
Nope, not according to bin Laden.
See? It’s not a double standard that he objects to, it is the mere fact that Israel exists.
Well, that’s what he said.
Regards,
Shodan