How much US bashing is enough?
By Claude Salhani
Bashing the United States for anything that goes wrong has become de riguer in today’s political world. The latest rant comes from Iran’s supreme leader, who once again berated the United States for the ills of the Middle East.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that negotiation with the US is banned because it only imposes losses to the country.
Iran, particularly, likes to blame all the ills of the world on the US. And so do a cluster of countries around the world. They find the US the perfect place to put blame for what malfunctions in their own countries.
The United States is far from perfect. Even though you will find many Americans who truly believe the United States is perfection in every sense of the word. These people are fools. They may be patriotic, but they are patriotic fools nevertheless.
In order to become a better society one needs to identify and accept what’s right, and what’s wrong, and particularly the wrong in order to make it better.
So if the United States of America is really as bad as many people make it out to be, then why the hell do so many people – often from the very countries attacking the US – so badly want to go live in these very same states they claim is the great Satan?
Travel to any of the countries in the developing world and swing by the US Embassy in the morning and watch the queues forming of people applying for visas in the hope of being granted the right to live in the United States of America.
It is somewhat ironic, that you never see queues by people hoping to emigrate standing outside the embassy of Iran, Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
Ask anyone in the Middle East, shy of an ayatollah—where they would prefer to live, where would they prefer their children to grow up and later be educated: in Tulsa or Tehran, Baghdad or Baltimore and I bet you a pile of devalued dinars, or half-priced barrels of oil, they would choose the Sooner state, yes, Oklahoma, over the Desert Kingdom any day, and Baltimore over Baghdad.
In demonstrations against their own governments – when they can get away with it, the protesters carry placards in English, not in Farsi, Arabic or Turkish of Chinese. Why? Because they want the AMERICAN media to know what they are fighting for.
Yet they keep cursing and attacking the US. The very same people who you might find on the front lines of the anti-US protests are the same ones queuing up outside the US consulate in the morning.
Although they keep on chanting “Down with USA, strangely enough still want to go there.
Years ago I had to go to Gaza for a week. Gaza is such a “garden spot –NOT!, that even Moses, who when leading his people out of Egypt decided to take “the long way home,” meaning by-passing Gaza.
Anyway, I had to put up with anti-Americanism for the good part of a week from this one just “mildly anti-American.'
So while saying goodbye the Hamas kid adds: “Do you know where and how I can get a Green Card?
I was so taken back by his request that I didn’t quite know what to say. When I finally replied, I said that even if I did know, I would not tell him and I would advice the US immigration authorities not to give him a visa.
His reply was that he didn't have anything against the Americans, it was the government he didn't like.
Well, quite often I don’t like the government either, but I always have the choice of voting them out of office a few years later. As Winston Churchill, former British Prime Minister once said, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”
And I’m quite sure Mr. Churchill include Iran’s current experiment in governance among those that have been tried and failed to make the mark.
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