In The Islamic World, The U.s. Is

And What Terrifies Me Is That We're Entering A Phase Where If You Start To Speak About This As Something That Can Be Understood Historically - Without Any Sympathy - You Are Going To Be Thought Of As Unpatriotic, And You Are Going To Be Forbidden. It's Very Dangerous. It Is Precisely Incumbent On Every Citizen To Quite Understand The World We're Living In And The History We Are A Part Of And We Are Forming As A Superpower.

... The Connection Between Imperial Politics And Culture Is Astonishingly Direct. American Attitudes To American "greatness", To Hierarchies Of Race, To The Perils Of "other" Revolutions (the American Revolution Being Considered Unique And Somehow Unrepeatable Anywhere Else In The World) Have Remained Constant, Have Dictated, Have Obscured, The Realities Of Empire, While Apologists For Overseas American Interests Have Insisted On American Innocence, Doing Good, Fighting For Freedom.

The Just Response To This Terrible Event [9/11] Should Be To Go Immediately To The World Community, The United Nations. The Rule Of International Law Should Be Marshaled, But It's Probably Too Late Because The United States Has Never Done That; It's Always Gone It Alone.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.

[roots Of Terrorism] Come Out Of A Long Dialectic Of U.s. Involvement In The Affairs Of The Islamic World, The Oil-producing World, The Arab World, The Middle East - Those Areas That Are Considered To Be Essential To U.s. Interests And Security.