Just because we’re making nice to the United Nations in Iraq, don’t think that the French and the Germans are making nice again with us.
Jeremy Gedmin, director of the Berlin branch of the Aspen Institute writes in the Weekly Standard that they’re just as nasty as ever. After the Abu Graib story came out, a centrist German newspaper opined: “America must now prove to the world that it is different from the dictatorships it is fighting against.”
This has become the popular theme in Germany, that there is a moral equivalence between us and the terrorists. The German Financial Times recently featured an article that asked: “Is the West’s anti-terror more humane than the terrorism we are fighting against?”
In addition to the wacky insults, there are also the infantile. The once conservative Die Welt newspaper insists on referring to Sec. of Defense Don Rumsfeld as Der Fuhrer, a word that Germans have carefully avoided since Hitler was knocked off his pedestal by another coalition 60 years ago.
You might thing that the folks who brought you the real Fuhrer—the one named Adolph—might exercise just a bit more caution in dredging up their own dirty laundry.
And that's the Observer.
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