ANDREI S. MARKOVITS
21
The blame for the murderous assault on New York and Washington,
D.C. is ultimately ascribed to the failed global and developmental pol–
icy of the United States.
If
that were the case, one would have to explain
why the assassins did not come from such poor countries as India or
Nigeria. Or why not from Islamic countries such as Bangladesh, Indone–
sia (the world's most populous Muslim country), or Malaysia? Apart
from the columns of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning
New York Times
journalist Thomas Friedman, an expert on the Near East though cer–
tainly no scholar of Islam, seldom was there any mention of one factor
that called for explanation; namely that there is not a single Arab coun–
try with anything approximating a democratic government. En bloc the
Arab world (n.b.:
not
the Muslim world) is the most undemocratic
region on earth, with even less democracy than sub-Saharan Africa.
The German reaction to this catastrophe was, on the one hand, mov–
ing and impressive. Hardly any other statesman, with the possible
exception of Tony Blair, held such an emphatic speech expressing full
solidarity with the victims of this assault as did Gerhard Schroder. The
many-frequently spontaneous-actions across Germany, such as the
five-minute nationwide work stoppage following a joint accord between
the German Trade Union Federation and the German Federation of
Employers Associations, and the major demonstration in Berlin, must
be acknowledged here in full. But even a cursory glance at the Internet
after September 12th revealed that underneath the official position of a
sympathetic Germany, a completely different Germany was flourishing.
One need not visit the web page of Horst Mahler,':· just the opinion and
feature pages of a few daily and weekly German publications, from the
Left's most widely read newspaper
die tageszeitung (taz)
to the country's
paper of record the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
with Germany's
leading news magazine
Der Spiegel
thrown in for good measure, in
order to read a bevy of letters and articles from a variety of people who
believe that the American victims were the real perpetrators of this cat–
astrophe, due to America's failed international policies, specifically the
Middle East, but really due to their very existence as Americans. Barely
one day after the attacks one could read many a piece in the German
press positing that now the task of the Germans and the Europeans was
to forestall the vengeful Old Testament-inclined Americans from striking
':-The former left-wing radical and lawyer of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof
group who migrated from the far left in the
'60S
and
'70S
to the far right
by the
'90S.
He is now the official council of the right-radical and neo-Nazi
National Democratic Party.
