Special
Report Europeans, too, feel vulnerable in wake of attack
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
With two telling phrases, the Sept. 12 Italian daily Corriere
della Serra summed up the reaction to terrorist attacks in New York and
Washington: We are all Americans, and Today the Atlantic does
not exist.
Such reactions suggest that here, on the other side of the
Atlantic, differences between Europe and the United States suddenly seem less
profound than differences between the West and the authors of such
violence.
We cannot cancel from our memory the phrase America
Under Attack that CNN selected as the title of the most frightening
tragedy of our time, the Italian daily wrote. We limit ourselves to
correcting it. It is all civilization that is under attack.
The Italian daily La Repubblica expanded on the theme.
There is a sentiment that unites Europe with wounded
America, and it is the sense of the fragility of democracy, the newspaper
wrote. It is an inevitable, facing the sudden blaze of seemingly
omnipotent terrorism. But democracy is not weak. It discounts the disproportion
between the unarmed citizens of a part of the world that considers
itself at peace, that recognizes the rights of others with respect to the
values of civil life, and a possessed, militarized minority that uses the legal
codes of peace in the West for deforming them through an occult, treacherous
war.
Germanys leading daily, the Berliner Zeitung,
likewise saw the events of Sept. 11 as a strike at all the West.
The World Trade Center may be for the terrorists the symbol
of imperialistic globalization, but for us it is -- with room for criticism at
the level of detail -- a symbol of the free trade of all peoples with each
other. It stands for make business, not war, the paper
wrote.
El Pais of Madrid put the matter starkly:
Tuesdays terrorist attack, let us not mislead ourselves, is a blow
against the essence of our political civilization.
What happened in the United States could be repeated in
Europe, the paper warned. The danger of emulation
terrorism is very significant in a media-saturated world.
The sense of fright came through clearly in initial radio and TV
broadcasts. The Italian state radio network broke in after the first explosion
at the World Trade Center, and as news of further attacks came in, commentators
noted how unsettling it is for some Europeans to see the United States so
vulnerable.
We complain about it, but psychologically we have come to
depend on the Americans, one commentator said. If this can happen
to them, we are all less safe.
Catholic reaction in Europe echoed the secular medias
America-friendly line. LAvvenire, the newspaper of the Italian
bishops conference, saw the attack as a wake-up for Europe to abandon a
growing anti-USA campaign, allowing differences on environmental
protection, globalization or the American and Israeli walk-out at the Durban
racism conference to generate accusations and hate.
LOsservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, took the
highly unusual step of remaking its front page twice Sept. 11 to accommodate
news and comment on the events in the United States.
The folly of terror was its banner headline, saying
that the attack recalled the memory of Pearl Harbor. Pope John Pauls
message of solidarity to President Bush was splashed in big type across the
front page.
Several European prelates expressed their own concern. Italian
Cardinal Pio Laghi, former apostolic nuncio to the United States and a friend
of the Bush family, described the events as profoundly frightening.
He said they leave me horrified.
Beyond expressing a new realization of the common situation facing
the West, the European press had two chief suggestions for Bush: Do not rush to
judgment, and think anew about Americas policy in the Middle East.
El Pais addressed the first point.
If the attack did emanate from the Islamic world, it will be
important not to create a total war in response to the act of a few. One would
then dig up the idea of Huntington, who forecast a brutal clash of
civilizations, betraying the extremely pluralistic and multicultural society of
America itself.
The Financial Times of London raised the second
caution.
Bush should also review his policy toward the Middle
East, the paper said. The administrations hands-off approach
and its tolerance of Prime Minister Ariel Sharons hard line has
encouraged extremists across the region looking for any excuse to demonize
Americans.
The e-mail address for John L. Allen Jr. is
jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 21,
2001
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