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Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003703
The Anti-Americans
(Wall Street Journal)- Fouad Ajami America is unloved in the alleyways of Nablus and Karachi, and in the cafes of Paris. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press came forth last month with news of anti-Americanism in foreign lands. Only 1% of Palestinians think "favorably" of the U.S. The anti-Americanism of Egypt is the malignant strain that leaders wink at. Egyptians can't rail against Hosni Mubarak; so anti-Americanism is the permissible politics. Where the dream of modernism atrophies, as it has in Egypt, and a culture of abdication settles in, a people are easy prey to any doctrine that absolves them of responsibility for their own world. In Turkey, the secular, modernist dream has cracked. Anti-Americanism blows Turkey's way from the Arab lands, and from Brussels and Berlin. The fury of the Turkish protests against America's war plans in Iraq had a pathology all its own. Turks burned American flags, it seemed, in the hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is) would take Turkey into the fold.