An anti-American could be a student in South Korea, a rightist in Japan, a soccer fan in Greece, a priest in Russia, an imam in Ghana, a protester in Pakistan - or a hijacker in the United States.

One complaint often directed against Americans is that they are willfully ignorant of the rest of the world. Foreigners amount to "remote little people on TV."

President Bush says that the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon did so because they hated freedom. There is probably a kernel of truth in that, but people who have studied the impulses of anti-Americanism around the world agree that the real answer is more complicated and more specific than the president's explanation would suggest.

Millions of people around the world hate America, and for most of them that hatred stems not so much from ideology as from history - their own history.

Anti-Americanism isn't always very logical, or consistent. It is, fortunately, only rarely violent. In some cases it has more to do with local politics than with actual American actions. But it is a potent force in a world dominated by a single economic and political superpower.

"Somebody has to be an enemy," says Mark Juergensmeyer, head of international studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "even if it isn't a real one."

And most of the time that somebody is the United States.

It is in the Middle East that anti-Americanism has found its most virulent voice. The United States is ritually denounced for its support of Israel and for the continuing economic blockade and occasional bombings of Iraq. These are issues that stir passions throughout much of the Muslim world. But among those who have been drawn to Osama bin Laden, who is accused by the United States of being the man behind the Sept. 11 hijackings, neither Israel nor Iraq is the motivating issue.

Rather, it is U.S. support for the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Both regimes are seen to be repressive, corrupt and wholly dependent on American backing. Egypt has a flourishing Islamic fundamentalist movement, one that finds eager recruits in the slums of Cairo and in impoverished villages. Saudi Arabia, in the minds of bin Laden and others, has sullied Islam by allowing U.S. troops to be stationed there. Bin Laden was a Saudi citizen until the kingdom stripped him of his citizenship in 1994, and he has said that the presence of U.S. troops anywhere in the country effectively defiles the mosques of Mecca and Medina.

"This is as much a conflict within Islam, and between Muslims, as it is a conflict with the West," says Matthew Cenzer, a lecturer in history and religion at Northwestern University. "In some ways it's a mistake to focus on how much these groups hate America, because they have a political agenda for the Middle East."

Their attitude could be expressed this way, Cenzer says: "If you get rid of the puppet master, you get rid of the puppet."

And that's the real goal.

But getting rid of the American puppet master - at a time when U.S. power and cultural influence are so pervasive - clearly wasn't going to be easy.

Throughout most of the world, America is inescapable. It is a beacon for millions. But for millions of others, it's more like a lightning rod for pent up resentment and frustration.

High on the list of visible American institutions abroad is the military. In Japan, for instance, there's an ever-present level of unhappiness over the U.S. occupation of Okinawa. In China, the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter jet caused fierce anger. Even in South Korea, which was saved from conquest by the U.S. Army, activists blame the American military for countenancing a massacre of university students in Kwangju in 1980.

Greeks blame the United States for supporting a military dictatorship there between 1967 and 1974. Russians, smarting from the loss of empire and power and worrying about the integrity of their own country, were aghast at the 1999 air war in Kosovo, which they saw as an inexcusable American intervention in the affairs of Serbia.

There was a moment during that war that seemed to sum up so much of the world's feelings toward America.

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, protesters marched and threw bottles of ink against the facade of the building. One carried a sign that read, "U.S.A.: Where were you in 1389?"

The reference was to the year in which the Serbs lost the battle of Kosovo Field to the Ottoman Turks, a seminal moment in Balkan history. But to ask that question of a country that, in the eyes of the protester, so infuriatingly refuses to believe in history of any kind was either poignant or ludicrous. And - even as this protest was playing itself out - an equally large crowd of Russians was gathered behind the embassy. They were waiting in line for U.S. visas.

That, in a nutshell, illustrated one of the more important divides in the world today - between those who are willing to embrace Americanization, and those who will not or cannot.

If America has stood for anything in the past decade, it has stood for globalization and free trade. There are emerging middle classes in places such as Russia and India that have prospered as their countries opened themselves up to a world economy. But local businesses fear the competition, and local politicians fear the loss of control, and millions simply have no chance to take part.

The world can be divided between those with a certain kind of knowledge, and those who lack it: "You either know how to write computer code or you don't," is how William Martel, a national security expert at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., puts it.

If you do, you're part of a new world economy largely defined by U.S. technological progress. If you don't, prospects are few and they're going to stay that way. Modern technology, says Martel, becomes evidence of your permanent inferiority.

For many a young man growing up in Cairo or Karachi, poverty and resentment are givens. Television and movies bring glimpses of what seems like an impossibly wealthy and horrifyingly chaotic society - one that is impossible to join and easy to blame.

Globalization, says Tony Kirschner, an assistant professor of cultural studies at Western Maryland College, relegates a lot of people to the margin, and after that - in societies around the world - there's a particular sort of religion they turn to. "People get pushed into fundamentalism when they have no choice," he says.

But what causes the break? Out of millions who are angry, what leads a few into the sort of murderous terror that took place Sept. 11? Who acts out what Kirschner calls the "irrational end of a rational response"?

To find out, Juergensmeyer of the University of California interviewed some of those who were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He realized that they were men who had felt put down and frustrated, and then, in a sort of epiphany, had suddenly seen that there was something like a secret war going on, and that the United States was the enemy.

This, in its own way, was empowering and exhilarating - and it also gave them something to do.

One, Mahmud Abouhalima, told Juergensmeyer, that after he moved to the United States he became increasingly frustrated by the realization that Americans had no sense of this cosmic war they were taking part in. So the attack on the World Trade Center was completely symbolic.

Juergensmeyer suspects that the organizers of the Sept. 11 attack see the conflict the same way. "They are trying to pull us into their view of a world at war," Juergensmeyer says. "Unfortunately, to some extent they're succeeding."

Their belief, he says, is that in a global conflagration, their particular brand of Islam must prevail. They woke the "sleeping giant" on purpose, to get on with it.

One complaint often directed against Americans is that they are willfully ignorant of the rest of the world. Foreigners, says Kirschner, amount to "remote little people on TV."

The men who destroyed the World Trade Center have succeeded, at least, in catching America's attention. Now they have their enemy's forces of globalization and technological prowess directed squarely against them.

Copyright © 2001 by The Baltimore Sun

###