Americans as the new Jews

Jim Hoagland:

Hoping to lower tensions between the Muslim world and the West, British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained the other day that the world confronts "a clash about civilization," not "a clash between civilizations." But the overriding lesson of events since Sept. 11, 2001, may be that you can't have one without the other.

In radical Islamic propaganda, the United States has graduated from being a mere Great Satan out to undermine Iran's ayatollahs to being depicted as a global monster responsible for virtually every crime and failing since the dawn of modern history. Meet the new Jews: the Americans.

Don't misunderstand. Americans have not replaced Jews at the top of the hate parade in Islamic countries. But the history of anti-Semitism, a word coined in Germany to provide a bogus scientific basis for prejudice against Jews, and its spread in recent years across the Middle East as an all-purpose explanation of whatever is wrong, should give Americans no cause for complacency.

The centrality of American power to global change -- good and bad, economic and political, topsy and turvy -- inevitably carries with it a heavy burden abroad of resentment and opposition. In the wake of Sept. 11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a widespread stereotyping and a visceral hatred that imputes racial characteristics to national policies and actions have also taken hold.

The distemper of these global times can be read in a wide variety of settings, where this new virulent anti-Americanism competes with historical anti-Semitism as a single explanation for the failures and delusions of entire nations.

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