cover image Hating America: The New World Sport

Hating America: The New World Sport

John Gibson. William Morrow & Company, $25.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-06-058010-0

Anti-American backlash over the invasion of Iraq gets a rejoinder in this rancorous manifesto. Fox News Channel pundit Gibson takes on a wide array of targets in""the great pageant of Hating America,"" including Arabs (many of whom have""mindless hatred"" for the U.S.), Germans (who find a""pure, addictive pleasure"" in anti-Americanism), the British (whom, he suggests, hate themselves for not hating Americans enough) and, of course, the French (who live in Chirac's""anti-American nation""). Gibson does unearth a lot of America-hating, from an Egyptian columnist's likening of Americans to cannibals, to bizarre German 9/11 conspiracy theories, to British novelist Margaret Drabble's confession that""I loathe America."" But his main charge, leveled through a rehash of UN wranglings during the run-up to the war in Iraq, is simply that other countries didn't understand our feelings after 9/11 and didn't support the American invasion. By lumping this reluctance under the rubric of hatred, Gibson reduces serious policy differences to emotional animus, mostly motivated either by the fear and envy the rest of the globe--including the""soft-life Euro-paradise""--feels towards America's""hard power,"" or by the sort of irrational tribal antagonisms characteristic of the sports world. This rhetorical strategy is ironic, given Gibson's own emotional appeal to the ruins of Ground Zero to argue that""America should not be required to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt"" when it goes after threats like Saddam Hussein. Gibson's truculent tone (""The rest of the world can go to hell. It wasn't attacked. We were. And we'll judge who plotted against us and who is plotting still"") will alienate readers who aren't already predisposed to his views, and might be perceived as another fine example of American belligerence. Photos.