Chelsea bristles at anti-U.S. talk

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, NOV. 13. Her father revelled in anti-U.S. war protests as a student at Oxford in the Sixties, but Ms. Chelsea Clinton is no peacenik and CND activists had a taste of it when she disrupted a meeting they were holding in Oxford Town Hall last week to denounce the U.S.- led military action in Afghanistan.

She was at the head of a group of American students who heckled anti-war campaigners, proudly waved the Star-and- Stripes and made a ``lot of noise'', as a CND spokesman described the scene with a touch of Oxonian understatement. However, a more mature fellow American - an old Oxford resident - shooed the ``flag- bearers'' back to their seats, upon which, according to newspaper reports, she stomped out of the meeting with her secret service bodyguards.

Ms. Clinton, who arrived in Oxford as a post-graduate student a day after the September 11 outrage in America, has confessed that she is greatly upset by the anti-American sentiment on the campus and is terribly homesick. Oxford veterans, however, say she is over-reacting and have reminded her of the anti-U.S. backlash when her father was here at the height of the Vietnam war. ``If you came here expecting all Oxford students, even in the wake of September 11, to doff their cap to Uncle Sam then I'm afraid you will remain sorely disappointed and depressed. This antipathy is nothing as your father could have told you,'' Mr. Charlie Talbott, a fourth-year student of Corpus Christi college, has written to her in an open letter published in Daily Telegraph.

The letter follows a widely reported article Ms. Clinton wrote for the U.S. magazine Talk in which she said it was tough for an American to be at Oxford these days. ``Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Sometimes, it's from other students, sometimes it's from a newspaper columnist, sometimes it's from peace demonstrators...I find I want to be among Americans - people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am.''

After the extracts from the article appeared in several British newspapers, many at Oxford agreed that there was ``ferocious'' criticism of U.S. policies on the campus but they said it was an old Oxford tradition and Ms Clinton shouldn't be taking it personally. ``It was a shame that she felt the need to interrupt a peaceful discussion with what I felt were inappropriate comments,'' Ms Katy Bernart, a student CND activist told The Times referring to Ms Clinton's behaviour.

In her Talk article, Ms. Clinton wrote that she ``bristles'' at the criticism of U.S. motives in attacking Afghanistan. ``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 said in what a newspaper termed as her ``cri de coeur''.

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Section  : International
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