WARPED HISTORY – AT 9:44 P.M. ET:  As we end this day of remembrance, we might reflect on how easy it is to distort history for political gain.  We see it all the time.  We have lived the lie, for much more than a generation now, that the United States lost the Vietnam War, when in fact we never lost a battle in Vietnam.

There are other myths and lies that get circulated, some by cranks, some by "serious" historians with an ideology to promote, some by journalists covering their own mistakes.  One of the greatest myths of the 9-11 era is that everyone loved America right after the attacks, that the world was gushing sympathy, and that Bush and Cheney ruined that international harmony.  That is wildly inaccurate.

Janet Daley, of London's Telegraph, an American-born journalist, reminds us of the vicious anti-Americanism that erupted right after the attacks, as the bodies were still burning in New York and Washington.  She reminds us of something we see over and over – how the political left swings into action to turn any event to its advantage:

Anyone who claims that the latest fashionable wave of political hatred for the US has been provoked by the Iraq war should look at the press coverage that sprang up in the first 48 to 72 hours after the attacks. When the invasion of Afghanistan – let alone Iraq – was only a possibility on the horizon, when the death toll was climbing into the thousands, and when people here were still desperately trying to contact American friends and family, sections of the British media were already engaged in a frenzy of vitriolic retribution.

The Guardian led the way, of course, with a now infamous series of comment pieces which reiterated the same vengeful theme: America had got what it deserved.

Its pages were filled with callous triumphalism ("They can't see why they are hated", "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully") alternating with frank threats: until the US changes its policy on the Middle East, it will continue to suffer terrorist attacks – which turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. (Oddly, there were no claims that the Spanish had got what they deserved after the later Madrid bombings, even though that incident was related to the Islamist goal of re-establishing the caliphate.)

The then comment editor of The Guardian, Seamus Milne, wrote a column last week in which he defended his choice of articles at that time with a bizarre post hoc justification: since America had indeed become enmeshed in military invasions after the attacks, this proved that his contributors had been right all along.

He and his comrades (I use the word advisedly) still seem incapable of grasping what was so profoundly offensive about this coverage: it was not a matter of politics, but of basic human decency. Would they accost a widow at her husband's funeral to shout that the idiot got what was coming to him, because he had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and never taken any exercise? What sort of people behave like this? What sort of country had I chosen to live in?

Then the BBC followed with an outrageous edition of Question Time, in which the audience shrieked abuse at anyone on the panel who uttered a word of sympathy for the US, and openly cheered the idea that the attacks were justified. Some of my New York friends were rung from London within days by people they had known for years to be told: "You know what everybody is saying here – that America got what it deserved."

And...

Now the refrain is: America lost an opportunity to examine its role and question its assumptions. Why, in other words, couldn't it have revelled in the kind of self-doubt and identity crisis that has become Europe's chronic condition?

COMMENT:  People forget that the now-famous headline after 9-11 in the French newspaper, Le Monde – "We are all Americans now" – actually topped a largely anti-American editorial. 

And four days after the attacks, a small group of loonies at Pace University, five blocks from Ground Zero, held an anti-American rally...as the ashes of their fellow citizens continued to rain down on their school.

Just some corrections of common myths.

September 11, 2011