LONDON (dpa) – Chelsea Clinton has learnt at least one important lesson since she started studying at Oxford University this autumn: Not everyone loves an American, even in a country considered to be Washington’s best friend abroad.
The lesson has been a painful one for the 21-year-old daughter of the former president, currently following in her father’s footsteps at the ancient English university.“Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Sometimes it’s other students, sometimes it’s from a newspaper columnist, sometimes it’s from the peace demonstrations,” she wrote in an article for New York’s Talk magazine.“It’s hard to be abroad right now,” she said, angered by the people who have criticised U.S. military action in Afghanistan.Before beginning a two-year masters in international relations, the younger Clinton had been determined to get to know as many British people as possible.“Now I find that I want to be around Americans – people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am,” she says.She is at a loss to understand why so many of her British fellow-students question the motives of the world’s only superpower.“I bristle at these suggestions. The idea that anyone believes America would enter into this conflict capriciously boggles my mind, and the notion that the United States is acting without regard to the Afghan people is offensive,” she says.Clinton personally went through the terror of the September 11 attacks in New York and they drive home to her “how much I loved the country I grew up in”.This led her to take part in opposing an anti-war demonstration in the Oxford city hall, waving the U.S. flag with four compatriots, shouting to the crowd: “How do you catch Osama (bin Laden) then?”Helen Salmon, who chairs the local student action group Stop the War sees this as “hilarious”.And Liz Hutchins, a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is of the opinion that the younger Clinton is confusing criticism of U.S. policies with anti-Americanism.Oxford Professor Jonathan Farley, a black American, went even further.“Shame on you, Chelsea. There are millions of people, every bit as American as you, who have every reason to question whether or not this is really a ‘war for democracy’, a ‘war against terror’ that will ‘keep America safe’.“I am speaking of the millions of Americans of African descent and the millions of others who oppose this war,” Farley said.“So Chelsea, please do not corral all Americans into the pro-war camp… One of Bill Clinton’s redeeming traits is the fact that, when he studied at Oxford, he opposed America’s war.“Maybe sometime, Chelsea, you will too,” Farley wrote in the left-liberal Guardian newspaper.At the end of the 1960s, when the former president was at Oxford, British anti-Vietnam War demonstrations had a far more strident and occasionally violent character than the protests against the Afghan campaign.Clinton, a Rhodes scholar 1968-70 would hardly have found himself out of step with the students of his day, but Chelsea had an altogether more sheltered upbringing as the daughter of a president for eight of her formative years.She soon sought to mend a few fences. “I’m so happy. I’m really happy. My dad is also very happy,” she said at a London event last week to raise funds for the September 11 victims.She said she was making new friends, both American and British. “I don’t live under a cloud of fear at Oxford. I get up every day and I live my life. I have much support at Oxford,” she told the audience.She may need it. Life at Oxford in the intellectual stratosphere can be lonely, and Ms Clinton has survived just two months of her two years there.
