Barbara Amiel vs. Margaret Drabble

In reply to Margaret Drabble's anti-American bilge last week, the London Telegraph runs a column by Barbara Amiel today:

Margaret Drabble went haywire on these pages last week. Her state was, she told us, "almost uncontrollable". She deceived herself. It was out of control....

One is tempted to call this visceral anti-Americanism "the Drabble syndrome", but she is neither the first nor the most prominent sufferer. You could as easily call it the Pinter syndrome and it certainly is the BBC syndrome....

If you watch the BBC for any 24 hours, you see institutionalised anti-Americanism. When Mayor Ken Livingstone told schoolchildren that President George Bush was "everything repellant in politics… venal... corrupt" [report, 10 May], the BBC's commentary was concerned only with how badly this would affect tourism in London - as if there was nothing substantially wrong in the remarks themselves....

The BBC has no idea that it has a bias. But in its anti-Americanism, as in its stand on a number of other issues (ranging from abortion to membership in Europe or the moral equivalence between the actions of suicide bombers and those of the Israeli army), there is nothing in its mind to be decided. If a dissenting view has to be presented, it will always be put in a defensive position.

The canard of choice among those voicing anti-American views is to claim to distinguish between Americans and the administration of George Bush, suggesting the latter is unrepresentative of the people. Every BBC interviewer relies on this, as did Drabble, Astee and Livingstone. But Mr Bush enjoys a popularity rating of more than 65 per cent among his countrymen.

The dislike of the United States has several components, including jealousy of its superpower success, dismay over America's eclipse of European economic and political influence, and unhappiness with a certain vulgarity in American culture. But the primary antagonism springs from the fact that British and European institutions - including the BBC and most of the media - are now firmly in the hands of the statist Left, with its slavish adherence to all the shibboleths of Left-liberalism....

See "I Loathe America, and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World".

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/12/03 08:53:02 AM
Categorized as International.