Are you all missing the point?

Submitted by David Wood (United Kingdom), Oct 9, 2002 at 05:03

Reading this particular interview and others on the site, and the comments, I have come to the conclusion that everybody else who has commented is reading a different interview than me, or is living in a different world.

Mr Pipes appeared to be launching an unsupported attack upon a good academic, who defended himself by pointing out Mr Pipes' lack of credentials and reliance on slander and innuendo. For the writers of comments to see this as a victory for free speech or justice, or indeed Mr Pipe, is quite strange.

I am not from the United States, however I used to live there. I have mixed ancestry: Irish-American, Polish Jewish, Scottish and English, and have lived in many different parts of the world, so I have some experience of (and feeling for) all sides of the current debate.

September 11th was a terrible and disgusting act of terrorism, there is no doubt about it, but to start to shut down debate, to try to argue that there is an 'American' way of thinking that is correct and cannot be challenged, will not address the root-causes of terrorist violence from outside or from inside the USA (let's not forget the last major terrorist attack was carried out by a white American).

Many people in the rest of the world are very disturbed by the use of September 11th as an excuse by the USA (supported I am ashamed to say by Britain) to carry out all sorts of extremist actions in order to maintain oil supplies, or to keep regimes favourable to the US in power (that's not a 'lefty' view - look at Mr Pipes' own Middle -East site for confirmation). We should not forget who was responsible for the creation and arming of Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. Going back in history, Britain and France's role in the division of Middel East should not be ignored either.

I liked the people I met in the USA. But, the state of basic education about the rest of the world in America is very poor, and very narrowly nationalistic. I used to think that it was bad in Britain, but I found that in the USA, there was a total lack of basic geographical and historical knowledge when it came to the world as a whole. I remember comments during the wars in the former Yugoslavia to the effect of 'let's bomb the Baltic' (rather than the Balkans...)...

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