Annie
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http://www.nysun.com/article/66588
Jews and Wasps
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
November 16, 2007
"I say there are two sides in the struggle:" wrote Osama bin Laden in one of the bombastic manifestoes that have so signally failed to unite the Islamic masses under his leadership. "One side is the global Crusader alliance with the Zionist Jews, led by America, Britain and Israel, and the other side is the Islamic world." President Ahmadinejad sees it the same way: America, Britain, and Israel are out to destroy everything that gives meaning and decency to the world.
This isn't just about power. The United States, says bin Laden, has "the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind." Greedy, licentious, exploitative we are a danger to man and an offense to God. The Syrian parliamentarian and critic of Hollywood culture Muhammad Habash describes the "project" of American culture to "crush the weak, oppress the weak, crush them, climb all over their corpses."
On this point, our enemies are less original than they suppose. A common hatred of Britain, America, Jews, and liberal capitalist modernity emerged in the 19th century and played a major role in the history and culture of the last 100 years.
Today's anti-Americans, anti-Semites, and anti-Zionists whether they are ex-Marxists, thuggish populists like many supporters of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or fanatical jihadis holed up in Waziristan have embraced a set of images and beliefs that haunted the European imagination for hundreds of years.
This hatred is the product of the great story of modern world history: the rise of a global system of power, commerce, finance, culture, and ideology resting first on the power of Britain and now on that of America. As horrified Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Soviets looked on, since 1688 the British have been on the winning side in every great power conflict in which they have fought with the single exception of the American Revolution. In other words, the two great English speaking powers have either separately or together won every major war since the 17th century, and the global system resting on their military and commercial prowess remains the foundation of international order today...