Barry Farber
Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001

"Tell me, Barry. Now that you've seen what they did to innocent people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, do you think there are going to be Americans not only blaming America for this, but actually taking the side of the terrorists?"

"No," I'd have said. "No, no way!"

And I'd have been wrong.

When the first of those blame-America voices came forward after the attack I took notes. The big teach-in at the University of North Carolina calling on America to begin by apologizing to the world. Then over to Berkley, Calif., where they were saying things even more hostile to America's behavior and intent. I made sure I got the spelling right. I was going to quote them by name and organization.

I changed my mind. Quoting a person by name in the public arena imputes a standing and a dignity to the person quoted that I refuse to accord to those blaming America and "explaining" if not actually excusing the terrorists. Even when you assail other people's views most bitterly, you've still somehow conferred a touch of collegiality upon them when you mention their names. You've thereby turned it all into something like ladies and gentlemen at the seminar disagreeing during the session between lunch and cocktails.

This is no forum.

This is war.

I no more care about their names than Marines on Okinawa squinted to see if there were nametags on the Japanese soldiers coming at them with bayonets. You don't have to mention their names to answer them.

My anger at this new crowd of "Blame America Firsters" is tempered by pity. You didn't prance around the wheelchair of the crippled boy in school and chant, "Ha, ha, ha. I can run and you can't!" And I don't feel like prancing around this new crowd chanting, "Ha, ha, ha. I can THINK and you can't!"

They've got a vitamin missing from their brains. The vitamin is called proportionality. The crimes of which they accuse America, even if true – which they are mostly, manifestly, not – are dwarfed by the obvious and undeniable crimes of the ones they support. And the virtues and good deeds of the United States are omitted from their rhetoric as if they were obscenities studiously censored by chaperones from a play about to be performed on the stage of the Gaffney, S.C., YWCA.

Proportionality is the ability – and the willingness – to distinguish morally between the mass murderer and the jaywalker.

"Hitler was an anti-Semite. My butcher is an anti-Semite. Come, let's discuss these two anti-Semites."

That's the fragrance of what happens when the glands of proportionality just don't pump.

America the "Great Satan," indeed! America, oppressor of Third World masses, indeed. America, the despoiler of Palestinian aspirations, indeed.

It's true, in America you can see enough female geography on any billboard to excite the heterosexual male. It even takes your gaze off the booze advertisements. But you know something? Without attacking the ascetic lifestyle of our attackers, let me venture a quiet word for mine.

It occurs to me that the countries that allow sex appeal and alcohol are the countries that write the checks for the countries that horsewhip a woman if she should show a half-inch of leg above the ankle and confine their legal libations to nothing stronger than yak tea.

Is it news to anybody that our developed world PAYS for Third World resources? And that the oil-rich satraps of the Near East COLLECT that payment? And continue to keep their own people in poverty, oppression, ignorance, totalitarian stranglehold and perpetual emotion?

And as for Palestinian aspirations, tell me: If a Palestinian state is so important now, why was it never mentioned during all the years when all it would have taken to achieve that would have been a stroke of the pen – until 1967, when Israel counterattacked and took that West Bank territory from the ANTI-PALESTINIAN Jordanians?

Look at America; the country they exult at having wounded so grievously. Can you name a country that ever amassed more power and abused it less? Can you name a country that ever amassed more wealth and distributed it more fairly?

Can you name another country that was ever attacked by surprise as America was in 1941, rallied to defeat both powerful enemies, and wound up with LESS land than it had previously? (America gave the Philippines its independence after victory in World War II.)

Can you name another country that, after victory, treated its allies and enemies alike to massive rehabilitation and rebuilding? Instead of rape and plunder we gave Germany and Japan democracy implants. They're both strong and prosperous democracies today. And you call that "satanic"?

My cousin Guerney visited Germany and Japan a few decades after the war, saw their democracy and prosperity, and came home and said, "I swear, I think we LOST World War II and they lied to us!"

Other countries roll over countries when the fortunes of war turn in their favor and somehow manage to keep those countries in their portfolios forevermore. America restored liberty to every single country we helped liberate in World War II. All we asked of them was enough land to bury our dead.

Have you forgotten that America had the nuclear bomb exclusively for four years beginning in 1945? Had we been so satanically inclined, we could have folded up the world and stuck it in our glove compartment with no backtalk Instead, we put the bomb away and hit Europe with the Marshall Plan, the most generous and expansive program of rebuilding the world has ever seen.

Once America did, indeed, invade a communist country without provocation or a declaration of war. Can you name it?

In the 1960s, Yugoslavia was stricken with an earthquake in the south in what is now the independent state of Macedonia. The main city, Skopje, was devastated. After failing to reach anybody in the terminally confused capital of Belgrade, America just went in: troops, doctors, hospitals, mobile operating chambers, food, clothing, blankets, medicine.

We've always chased fire engines around the world, bringing aid, comfort, hope and help. Still, campuses from Chapel Hill to Berkeley insist WE are the ones who have to change our ways.

Funny how the very same people who blame America for Sept. 11 insist that NOTHING could have justified the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – not Pearl Harbor, not the rape of Nanking, not the death marches, not the kamikazes, not the all-out attempt to own Asia and America by violent takeover. NOTHING, the line goes, could possibly justify the atomic bombs on two Japanese cities.

Apparently, though, there ARE some things that CAN justify the murder of 7,000 random Americans and citizens of other countries in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Were I to come face to face with those Americans who say it's all America's fault and hooray for the courage of the terrorists, I would not shake a fist at them or utter an obscenity.

Why use dynamite when insect powder will do?

Barry Farber's daily radio program is heard on more than 65 stations across America on the Talk Radio Network.