Of Terrorism in United States: A French Perspective

Following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, French publishers were prompt to stock bookstores with opportune material reflecting on the shocking event. One set of publications considered the implications of U.S. power in our world order; a second type, more pragmatic, dissected the terrorist cabal behind the attacks. This bifurcation is symptomatic of the schizophrenic French response to September 11. On one hand, the terrorist attack on the United States is partly condoned out of sympathy for any form of resistance to Americanization—i.e., the rejection of the socio-cultural syncretism that accompanies globalization, to which the French intelligentsia, in particular, is so strongly and sterilely opposed. On the other hand, militant Islam grows too close to the heart of European societies to qualify for indulgence, and Islamic terrorism is a familiar business for European security agencies, one they have handled over the last decade with unrelenting realism.

France initially reacted to September 11 with instinctive and genuine sympathy for its two hundred-year ally. This feeling, shared by the population at large and by the political and intellectual elites, was best expressed by Jean-Marie Colombani, the director of the leftist newspaper Le Monde. Colombani asserted on 12 September 2001 that, "Nous Sommes Tous Américains" (We are all Americans), echoing Kennedy's 1963 Berlin speech. But this spontaneous, primordial sympathy was quickly sucked into the postideological soil that nurtures the French intelligentsia. For these Cartesian minds, U.S. hegemony is potentially a bigger threat to civilization than ramshackle Muslims equipped with box cutters or leftover ordnance from the Afghan war and the liquidation of Soviet assets. Many perished in the World Trade Center—a horrible truth that is not ignored—but it is in the nature of elites to worry more about the unique culture and civilization that they embody than about Philistine masses of mortals. The United States—a formidable concentration of unrefined power—threatens the livelihood and the corporatist instincts of the French literati.

A sad example of anti-American ranting was penned by Marc-Edouard Nabe, an egotistical character notorious for privileging rambling over thinking. The title of his book, A Glimmer of Hope, reveals his desire to see in September 11 the shaming of the United States. ¹ As marginal a character as Nabe may be on the French intellectual scene, his utterance captured an essential element of truth: many in Europe would privately confess a disturbing, if vague, shiver of elation from the sight of the crumbling Twin Towers.

Few around the world were immune to the entertainment that came out of the spectacle of September 11. The grandiose collapse of New York's tallest buildings dwarfed the human tragedy, just as the sinking of the Titanic represented something greater than the sum of its frozen victims. But the carefully repressed glee that many in Europe felt was magnified, and at the same time exonerated, by latent anti-Americanism. The United States had it coming—it was punished for its arrogance, its presumptuousness, and its blind righteousness. The events of September 11 were retribution for injustices committed in the unfettered and brutal exercise of power. This popular indictment was not simply political: it contained the morbid fascination commonly drawn from the spectacle of fallen idols. The United States was bigger than life in foreign minds and its reduction that accompanied the events of September 11 was welcome.

The revisionist thesis of Thierry Meyssan was worse than Nabe's. ² Not content with a poorly substantiated argument that no airliner ever hit the Pentagon on September 11, Meyssan contends that it was U.S. agents who planted a bomb that destroyed a side of the building in a cynical operation of intoxication September 11 was a forged alibi for the "Empire" to "Attack"—a similar claim to that which has sometimes been made about Pearl Harbor. Sales of his L'Effroyable Imposture quickly reached one hundred thousand copies; its "thesis...