Atlantic Alliance Continues to Crumble
Vol: 22 Issue: 24 Thursday, July 24, 2003
According to a new poll conducted in Germany by the weekly magazine, Die Zeit, a significant number of Germans don t believe that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington. According to the poll, they think we did it ourselves. Not a few on the lunatic fringe, but one in three Germans under thirty and almost twenty percent of Germans overall think the attack was orchestrated by Washington.
Asked whether they believed that the U.S. government could have ordered the September 11 attacks itself, 31 percent of those surveyed under the age of 30 in the poll answered “yes”. And 19 percent of Germans from all age groups gave the same answer.
Our alleged alliance with old Europe continues to deteriorate, as bewildered Americans wonder how it could be that a nation like Germany could hate us so much? After World War II, the United States footed the bill to rebuild Germany, helped it build a strong, prosperous economy, and preserved and protected it from Soviet domination for forty years.
The Germans became our closest and most valuable European allies and our friendship was both warm and strong. But, after two generations of guilt, young Germans are now demonstrating against the United States and feeling good about themselves because it is the United States, not Germany, that is seen by many as the aggressive warmonger.
This anti-Americanism is much worse than what has gone before. Analysts warn that a whole generation of America-haters is being created, a European generation which they say believes Americans deliberately bomb civilians and kill Arab babies.
In a recent and widely discussed book on America, Apr s L’Empire, credited by many with having influenced the position of the French government on the war in Iraq, Emmanuel Todd writes: “A single threat to global instability weighs on the world today: America, which from a protector has become a predator.”
A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media’s coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans.
During the few days before America’s attack on Baghdad, European commentators displayed a barely concealed glee – almost what the Germans call schadenfreude – at the prospect of American forces being bogged down in a long and difficult engagement.
Max Gallo, in the weekly magazine Le Point, drew the typical conclusion about American arrogance and ignorance: “The Americans, carried away by the hubris of their military power, seemed to have forgotten that not everything can be handled by the force of arms … that peoples have a history, a religion, a country.”
Anti-Americanism in Europe historically comes in waves. In the 1980s Europeans vilified then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Before that there were anti-Vietnam War protests against U.S. presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.
Yet the current outbreak has new elements, including a demographic shift: In Britain, there are now more worshippers in mosques on Fridays than in Church of England churches on Sundays.
Among Europe’s growing Muslim population, the United States has few friends.
Says Dominque Moisi of the French Institute of International relations: “Today’s anti-Americanism in Europe is a combination of what America is doing — preparing to go to war in Iraq — and what America is: the country of the death penalty, the country — in European eyes — of arrogance.”
Adds Manfred Guttamacher of Potsdam University in Germany: “We are on the brink of a fundamental rift between the United States and Europe which goes much deeper than the rifts that came up in the course of anti-American sentiments in the ’60s or early ’80s.”
In the 20th century — in the fight against Nazism and later the Cold War against communism — a European-American political alliance emerged that many thought would last forever. That assumption looks somewhat less certain now.
Assessment:
Old Europe continues to come together under the contradictory banners of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and pro-globalism. At the same time, the Europeans have decided that they should play a leading role in enforcing a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs.
The Israelis are beginning to look to old Europe as well not because they trust the Europeans, but because it looks like the Europeans may be the only ones who can offer any realistic hope of security.
The Israelis are floating the idea of joining the European Union (a plan heartily endorsed by EU President Silvio Berlusconi of Rome) hoping that membership in the EU might provide some measure of collective security against external attack.
Increasingly, Israel s close association with the United States has become a liability in the negotiations with the Arab world. The Arabs won t talk to Israel directly, and so Washington has traditionally served as Israel s representative. But the Arab world doesn t trust Washington anymore than it does Jerusalem. So now it is Washington that needs a representative to carry on political discourse with the Arabs for the same reason Israel needed Washington in the past.
Inexorably, the United States is being weaned away from its role as protector of Israeli democracy, in favor of Europe, which stands in waiting.
US protection of Israel has included efforts to divide Jerusalem and make it a shared capital between the two proposed states.
The prophet Zechariah warned that in the last days, Jerusalem would become a burdensome stone for all people, and that all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces a pretty fair description of what has happened to the US international relations over the past decade since Oslo.
Daniel says that the final arbiter of peace between Israel and the Arabs will be the coming prince of the revived Roman Empire, not the president of the United States. Somehow, Daniel says, he will divide the land for gain, saying that, by peace [he shall] destroy many.
According to Daniel, the antichrist will CONFIRM a seven-year plan for peace, and that halfway through, he will withdraw his hand of protection from the Jewish state. Europe is being positioned for its coming appointment with destiny. In this generation. What does that mean for the Church?
“And when these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” (Luke 21:28)
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