Bawer wrote about Norway specifically in a 2004 essay titled ‘Hating America’, in ‘The Hudson Review’. His following lines perfectly characterize the experience I was having in Ireland in the autumn of 2001:
“… Then came September 11. Briefly, Western European hostility toward the U.S. yielded to sincere, if shallow, solidarity (‘We are all Americans’). But the enmity soon re-established itself (a fact confirmed for me daily on the websites of the many Western European newspapers I had begun reading online). With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it intensified. Yet the endlessly reiterated claim that George W. Bush ‘squandered’ Western Europe’s post-9/11 sympathy is nonsense. The sympathy was a blip; the anti-Americanism is chronic. …”
