Just when you thought frère Jacques Chirac
d’Iraq was in deep voodoo, along came his eminence Gary Hart with
an oft-repeated sermon thundering against “Americans who too often
find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original
homelands from their loyalties to America and its national
interests.”
Hart has been speaking out against the Iraqi phase of the war on
terrorism, lest it deprive him of the fame he achieved for warning
well before 9/11/01 of the looming terrorist menace. Now he assures
us he wasn’t casting aspersions on American Jews (yeah, right,
sure, ahuh), nor even on Cubans or on America’s Irish and their
tendency on St. Patrick’s Day to easily confuse Iraq with Erin and
Eire and Iran. Unfortunately for the Hon. Hart, he’s the one who
mentioned “loyalties” twice, which can only mean he’s charging
certain Americans with having “dual” loyalties.
That’s quite an accusation to make against anyone. Certainly it
can backfire. For instance, if Hart has two girlfriends, is he
displaying “dual” loyalties? Back in his youth, when perhaps he
drove a hot rod, did he not soup it up with duals carbs and dual
brakes? As a boy, didn’t he play cowboys and Indians while wearing
dual holsters? In college, wasn’t he a dual major?
Dual systems are a plus in anyone’s book. Just look at what
happens to those who do not display dual loyalties. Most notably
there’s the case of the University of South Florida’s de-tenured
professor Sami Al-Arian, the indicted alleged leader of Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. Professor Al-Arian has been a legal resident of the
United States since 1989. Yet he never obtained U.S. citizenship, a
sure sign he was not about to leave himself vulnerable to any
dual-loyalty charge. He knew that his hothead friends back in the
Middle East would not be pleased if he displayed even outward
fidelity to his adopted country. Hence his motto: “Let us damn
America, let us damn Israel, and their allies until their death.”
Not the kind of thing you say when you’re sworn in as a new
American.
But Al-Arian also knew too that displaying no loyalty to the
U.S. would greatly enhance his standing in key American circles:
the very ones now rushing to defend him as Joe McCarthy’s latest
victim. No sooner was the Palestinian prof indicted than his team
of lawyers, led by Peter Jennings, took to the airwaves to dismiss
the charges against their client as lacking evidence. Of course,
their reports suppressed all evidence disadvantageous to their
man.
No worry that Peter Jennings will ever be accused of displaying
duality. Interestingly, his counterparts Brokaw and Rather have
been anchoring their broadcasts from Kuwait. Don’t expect Peter to
do likewise, at least not until Saddam renounces his territorial
claim to that small country. Peter’s singular loyalties are
unmistakable.
There’s more to this story. Earlier this week former President
Jimmy Carter signed on to an international movement that
overwhelmingly regards the U.S. as the world’s greatest threat to
piece. His former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
dutifully followed along, penning an op-ed in the Washington
Post insisting on the primacy of the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute and criticizing the Bush administration for supporting the
policies of Israel’s Sharon government. Why, did you know that
current U.S. policies bear a striking resemblance to positions laid
out in 1996 by several American backers of Benjamin Netanyahu and
the Likud Party to whom they were sent along as recommendations?
It’s got Europeans upset, Brzezinski upset, and maybe even Saddam
Hussein. Hot tip: If they check the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, they’ll notice an even more uncanny resemblance.
Brzezinski mentions “the European penchant for conspiracy
theories,” but that hardly explains the recent behavior of France’s
Chirac and his effort to impose the Brezhnev Doctrine on the former
Eastern Europe. “They missed a good opportunity to shut up,” he
said, apropos those emerging democracies’ open support of U.S.
policies. What a shocking turn of phrase, so indelicate, crude,
and, well, un-French. No Frenchman has ever been accused of dual
loyalties, but at least until now it was safe to assume that no
French president, as befits leaders of a culture that has
institutionalized selfishness as a cardinal virtue, had ever
abandoned loyalty to French greatness. But that was before the rise
to power of Jacques Chirac, a lowly sans-culottes, which
in English translates as Enemy of the Week. Let’s hope there’s room
at the Bastille.
