Anti-Americanism has taken the world by storm
   Additionally, if America now attacks other countries suspected of harbouring terrorists, it will almost certainly do so alone, without the backing of the coalition that supported the action in Afghanistan. The reason is that America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.
   However, even if that settlement were arrived at tomorrow, anti-Americanism would probably not abate. It has become too useful a smokescreen for Muslim nations' many defects - their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self-loathing ("we hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves").
   Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart, and, oddly, far more personalised. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance", its success; in the non-American west, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted ("Americans only care about their own dead"). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues.
   Salman Rushdie: Anti-Americanism takes the world by storm