ABSTRACT
Former CBS TV news anchor Dan Rather said that the US was attacked ‘because they’re evil, and because they’re jealous of us’. (quoted in Navasky 2002: xv)
Former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich blamed Hollywood for the country’s abject world status, calling for a new public diplomacy that would ‘put the world in touch with real Americans, not celluloid Americans’. (Gingrich and Schweizer 2003)
Former Chair of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee Henry Hyde referred to the ‘poisonous image’ of the US overseas. (Henry Hyde quoted in Augé 2002: 161)
The Council on Foreign Relations maintained that anti-Americanism is partly fuelled by ‘the broad sweep of American culture. Hollywood movies, television, advertising, business practices, and fast-food chains from the United States are provoking a backlash.’ (Council on Foreign Relations 2003: 24)
Novelist Don DeLillo told readers of Harper’s Magazine that ‘the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind’ was the problem. (Don DeLillo 2001)
But the writer Arundhati Roy has powerfully queried the claim that 11 September 2001 was an assault on the US as a symbol of freedom, asking why the Statue of Liberty was left untouched, while symbols of military and economic might were targeted. She suggests that this should encourage us to understand the attack as a brutal critique of power, not of liberty, and that subsequent responses would illustrate much about the US and supposed anti-Americanism (Roy 2001).
