by Earl D. Rabd

About the author: Earl D. Rabd is the founding director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University and a former executive director of the San Francisco area Jewish Community Relations Board.

In the hours after the twin towers came crashing down on September 11, a tidal wave of support for a war against terrorism swept across the country; Americans had not been so united about anything in over a half-century. But almost immediately, an undertow of perverse opinion was created by the “semiapologists”—those who deplore the acts of terrorism but, at the same time, shift an appreciable amount of the blame onto America. In so doing, they not only minimize the acts of terrorism, but suggest that those acts would stop if America would only behave more nobly...