NYPost

DON'T BET ON EUROPE

By STEVE CUOZZO

September 23, 2001 -- BEING marooned in Europe on Sept. 11, 2001, and stuck there a week, gave me an unholy hate-on for the whole smug "Continent." Not the Europe of Colosseums and Eiffel Towers, but of Europeans.

Britain, as always, will stand with us in our war against terrorists and their sponsors. But a week in Rome - sympathetic capital of a friendly NATO country - told me we are otherwise on our own.

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe I expected too much from a land whose citizens had not, after all, had to watch couples leap hand-in-hand from the 90th floor.

And circumstances contributed to my despairing mood: having landed an hour before the attack, I could not get back home till last Monday.

It felt grotesque staying in a luxurious Old World hotel in a sunlit city drenched in post-millennial prosperity while New York bled and wept. I was dislocated from the suffering it was my duty as a New Yorker - damn it, my right - to share.

Night and day, I was stunned by how normally life in the streets of Rome went on. I never saw a TV in a public place tuned to the catastrophe.

Can you imagine such denial in New York, if a sneak attack obliterated the Vatican or the houses of Parliament?

To be fair, Rome opened its hearts to Americans. The mayor wrote us offering help. "Solidarity With America" posters popped up, and the grounds of the evacuated U.S. Embassy were strewn with flowers.

But I wanted more. I wanted commitments to armed backbone - not French Premier Jacques Chirac's "solidarity of the heart."

For all its ancient and Renaissance splendors, Rome is a "world" city of 2001, with trendy, Tribeca-like hotels, and South Beach-styled restaurants. Yet last week, it felt like being in a neutral capital of the mid-1930s.

It wasn't the pre-war splendor of chandeliers and tuxedoed waiters that made me feel like we had beamed into a den of appeasers - England's Cliveden, or a palace in Vichy France. The same day Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was proclaiming his support for the U.S., the head of the Italian military was ruling out armed participation.

I took no comfort in hearing our Rome neighbor, the "heartbroken" Polish pope, predictably urging President Bush to exercise "restraint."

It put him squarely in the restraint-urging corner of that gallivanting Euro Madonna, an ex-New Yorker who bolted town for a taste of the permanent British class system with a temporary English husband.

I learned of Madonna's deeply thought position from The Post's Web site. Although you can buy foreign papers at most any newsstand in New York, in Europe, it remains infuriatingly impossible to read anything from America except on-line.

You are left with USA Today, the hair-splitting International Herald Tribune, and the U.K. papers. The Tribune, and too many British dailies, blather on so tendentiously over the "roots" of Muslim anti-Americanism, you could lose sight of their insidious subtext: that the wretched state of lands from Algeria to Afghanistan is somehow the fault of Israel.

While our hotel TV offered three English-language stations, I counted five in Arabic. That at least beat the Georges V in Paris, where I recall one English station and eight Arabic - each of which carried, at any given hour, a "Death to America" tantrum in the streets of the channel's host country.

In Rome, we had to choose among CNBC, CNN Europe, and the BBC, the latter two full of noxious apologists for Arab and fanatical-Muslim atrocities.

One particularly unctuous twit declared on the BBC that America's rage over the attack resulted from our having been "humiliated." America was not humiliated, but ennobled, by New York's valiant response to the slaughter of civilians. Was she ignorant of meanings? Or wasn't she, more likely, playing footsie with the slaughterers?

The Swiss-born operator of a certain Rome hotel got past any grief over our 5,000 dead and missing to tell me, "Bush is too tough on the Arabs." It was a reminder of the clout wielded in Europe by the vagabonding entourages of every terror-backing oil state.

At our own hotel, a mob of Middle Easterners, cowed by circumstances, milled about the place with something less than the usual swagger. Call me a bigot, but I couldn't stomach the sight of them, with their bodyguards and retainers - the personification of the drinking-and-womanizing ruling clique so abhorred by the Arab "street."

Rome laughs off the landmarks of its Fascist past, like Mussolini's balcony at the Piazza della Venezia. A democratic nation that promptly rejected its blackest hour is entitled to do that.

But Europe's gift for denying the lessons of its unspeakable past is intact. And even Euros who first seem to take the right side can give you the chills.

A young German we met started out by declaring how vile the terrorists were. Soon, though, his words took on a darker complexion:

"We have the same problem in Germany," he said. "The Turks. They are Muslims - lazy, anti-Christian and homosexuals.

"And you know what is the worst thing? They have the same rights as Germans. They are citizens and we can do nothing about them."

He might, of course, have been a Nazi talking about the Jews. It was enough to find sympathy in a corner of my heart for Islam - something not a week of Euro-babble had been able to do.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001