Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

In today's New York Times (registration required), Thomas Friedman updates the post 9/11 question of "Why do they hate us?" to a post-Iraq "Why does everybody else hate us?"

In seeking an answer, he quotes Nayan Chanda, publications director at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. "Where we are now is that you have this sullen anger out in the world at America. Because people realize they are not going to get a vote over American power, they cannot do anything about it, but they will be affected by it," says Chanda.

One country where this "sullen anger" has been manifest for some years now is Greece. Dismayed by the collapse of communism, the Greek left, unable to anything resembling a coherent concept of a post-Soviet world, decided that source of all ills — those of the world and Greece — was the United States. The Greek media acted as a willing chorus and so a climate emerged in which virulent anti-Americanism became politically correct, and a local terror group, which specialised in murdering foreigners, found willing hosts.

The Greek media debasement touched rock bottom during the Iraq war, but now 32 journalists, professors, political scientists, lawyers and economists have decided that enough's enough. Their signed protest is published today in the mass circulation Athens daily Apogevmatini, and has been circulated to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist and the Daily Telegraph. I am honoured that Stavros Petrolekas, one of the signatories, should think me worthy of inclusion on the group's media list. Here's an excerpt from the protest letter:

First, the stance of Greek public opinion makers, both prior to and during the War in Iraq, bore no relation to the quest for Peace, the tragedy of human loss or the legitimate concern over global American political hegemony. It was simply — covertly at first and undisguisedly so later on — support for the inhuman and destabilizing regime of Saddam Hussein.

This stance bore no relation to the quest for peace, in that those who hauled people to the streets had never felt the need to demonstrate, when Saddam Hussein launched his murderous wars against his neigbours. As the USA indeed exhibits, selective sensibility, so these ostensible "peace supporters" exhibited similar selectivity. They were troubled when the USA and Britain threatened Saddam but never felt so concerned when he showed himself to be the most destabilizing factor in this most incendiary of regions in the world.

This stance bore no relation to the tragedy of human loss during the War. Those who expressed their "sensibility" for the 4,000 civilian casualties of the war, showed no such concern during the incredible butcheries with which Saddam distinguished himself in previous wars.

They remained indifferent to his slaughter of 50,000 Shiites in Southern Iraq in 1991, as they remained indifferent for those 5,000 dead from his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish villages in Northern Iraq in 1988. A "human rights movement" that ignores the massacre of thousands of civilians and remonstrates the 4,000 "collateral damages" of this war does not reveal "selective sensibilities". It reveals, rather, exploitation of the humanitarian sentiments of public opinion for propaganda purposes.

Second, this stance bore no relation to justifiable anxieties about a collapse in international legality. Anyone seriously interested in international legitimacy issues knows full well that the Saddam regime had violated 17 sanction-based resolutions of the Security Council. No other regime in the world accumulated such a record of transgressions of UN resolutions against it. And insofar as it remained without reprimand, the stature of the Organization deteriorated.

These same "pacifists" who invariably endorsed the soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia (1968) or Afghanistan (1980), rose up in the name of "international legality" when the USA intervened in Afghanistan (2001) and in Iraq (2003). But they did not arise, three years ago, when Russia was massacring the Chechnyan separatists. Nor when France was strutting around so many African states. This however has nothing to do with a real gap in international legitimacy, which in fact does genuinely exist. It simply exploits this gap for propaganda manipulation of Greek public opinion.

This is a courageous document and shows that not everyone has succumbed to the totalitarian groupthink which has so much of European public opinion in its grip. It is a privilege to be associated, even in a minor way, with brave people who are willing to swim against the tide.