It is so sad anti-Americanism exists and I am doing so little to fight it, but, wow, I am in good company trying to do so. At least that is what I felt when reading Dale Hurd`s article on “Europe’s Anti-American Agenda”, CBN News, June 15, 2007.
Excerpts:
There’s nothing new about America bashing. But in this first of a two-part series, CBN News examines why America bashing in the European media is getting worse, and why some say it is turning our allies against us.
Polls clearly show that Europeans have turned against America in increasing numbers. You can blame Iraq or George Bush. But it’s also true that Europeans have been fed a steady diet of media distortions about America for years.
And if you repeat a distortion long enough, it can become reality. (…)In Berlin, American Jeffrey Gedmin, president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has spent a lot of his time busting the stereotypes of Americans pushed by the German media.
Gedmin said, “The intuitive stories are fat children, fast food, death penalty, no culture, Guantanamo. Current topics? Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Guantanamo, Guantanamo, Guantanamo.”
He continued, “I gave a talk to a group of high school students about three months ago. The first question was about Guantanamo. You know what the second question was? Guantanamo. You know what the third and fifth and ninth questions were? Guantanamo. Do you know after an hour I couldn’t get them off Guantanamo? Where do they get that? Is it from the air or the water or — is it this constant drumbeat, ‘the Americans are abusing human rights,’ ‘The Americans don’t play by the rules.’”?
Ray Drake, who is both an American and German citizen, became so upset by the lies and distortions about America in the German press that he helped start the Web site Davids Medienkritik to track it.
Drake said, “I had Germans actually ask me, ‘Does everyone carry an M-16 around with them in the United States?’ And they were absolutely serious. And that’s when I began to wonder, ‘What’s going on here? Where are they getting these crazy ideas?’”
“People in Germany have got ideas about the United States that are totally skewed,” he added, “totally based on misinformation, and have very little to do with reality.”
A few years ago, if you went looking for the history of America on the German newsmagazine Stern’s Web site, you would have seen this quote in German: “No nation has ever dominated the globe like the U.S.A. And its people could not care less about the rest of humanity.”
After Drake posted this on his site, public outrage forced him to change it.
German citizen Karin Quade became so upset by anti-Americanism, she began her own Web site to fight it.
She said, “It is very difficult to get positive information about the U.S. because the mainstream media doesn’t spread it. You have to read the pro-American blogs. You have to read the Internet.”
“It’s difficult to have a conversation without having the anti-American topics on the table,” Quade said. “Even the weather. George W. Bush is to blame for global warming.”
University of Michigan professor Andrei Markovits, the author of Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, says that for the first time, anti-Americanism, which has always existed on the fringes of Europe, has entered the mainstream.
Markovits says it’s created a market for anti-American news.
“I was just at a talk where a very imminent German journalist of a German newspaper — I don’t want to mention the name — said my guys back at headquarters really want bad stuff. This is what really sells,” Markovits said. (…)
Thanks Bob for sending the link!