Angles 'n' Attitudes

When agreements with Arab potentates had been negotiated, millenarian Protestant missionaries aimed to help Jews return to Palestine and to convert them and decadent Muslims and Eastern Christians in the process. They had little success in those ways but U.S. interests did sponsor trade, exploration, tourism, schools, the English language, medical and other scientific knowledge in North Africa and east of Suez. They suffered hardships, aroused Islamic ire and generally engendered mistrust and suspicion. All the while, English and French entrepreneurs watched Yankee manufacturers of guns and other products of The Great Democracy closely but British consular officials, especially those who had similar religious interests, assisted their fellow anglophones whose Puritan pioneers had bequeathed an Old Testament fascination with the Land of the Bible and the messianic conviction that their republic was to be "a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel". Many of those were to become Christians and farmers in a modern, U.S.-modelled Holy Land. Few Jews, then or later, caught that vision. Subsequent U.S. intervention in the Muslim world has been a mixture of messianism, altruism, curiosity and commercial greed, notably an obsession with oil. The result of the past 200 years of such soft imperialism' is the current Iraq dilemma, the Palestinian problem, the Iranian provocations, Saudi Wahabbist (Wahhabist, Salafist) terrorism and an aggravated internal rivalry among Muslims. The "Great Satan" of the U.S. of A. (but let us call it, rather, the pious, self-righteous, short-sighted and nationalist policies of those who govern our southern neighbours) has created a universal reaction, even in other democratic nations. It may be a misunderstanding, but there is a perception that "21st Century America" intends to try to remake the whole world in its own image and to use a secular (Sabbath restrictions notwithstanding) Israel as its base in the Middle East. Should Canada be an accomplice in that plan? The fact is that, since leaving the unity of the Empire/Commonwealth, "America" has been a combination of friend and irritant. When it is isolationist it weakens us all and when it acts unilaterally it creates problems it cannot solve unaided. http://www.citizen.on.ca:80/news/2007/0426/Columns/042.html

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