A former American diplomat has accused the Irish media of playing a part in the terrorist attacks of September 11th by stirring up "anti-Americanism" internationally.
Mr George Dempsey, first secretary of the US embassy in Dublin from 1988 to 1992, said "dishonest" stories circulated by Irish newspapers and broadcasters had helped to fuel terrorism in the Arab world.
A spokeswoman for the US embassy said Mr Dempsey was entitled to his views, but "his views are entirely his own, and he does not speak for the embassy".
In a book to be published next month, on the eve of President Bush's visit to Ireland, Mr Dempsey criticised what he described as "witless pandering to Arab irrationality and intransigence" in the Irish media.
Of the attacks on September 11th, he writes: "Let us be clear about this. The Irish media, in general, bear their share of responsibility for what happened in the United States.
"For far too long in this country there has been a prevailing view, which denigrates and condemns and even vilifies American foreign policy.
"Many of these venomous falsehoods - such as claims that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed in the Gulf war - have continued to spill out over Irish airwaves this last week. The hatred of America, which drove the suicidal terrorists, doesn't flourish in a global vacuum."
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday from his home in Sacramento, California, Mr Dempsey - who lived in Dublin for 15 years - said he did not object to criticism of US foreign policy. Rather, he opposed its "deliberate mischaracterisation" in the Irish media.
One "dishonest" claim widely asserted following the 1991 Gulf War was that depleted uranium shells were causing cancer in Iraq - a "scientific nonsense", he said. Another lie, he said, was "that UN sanctions were responsible for children being killed in Iraq when anyone who paid attention in the world knew it was Saddam's manipulation of the sanctions which caused the misery.
"Why do people say things they know not to be true? I offer a number of suggestions. People in authority in the media came of age intellectually when universities were heavily leftist, and lying about the United States is par for the course for liberal leftists, as it is for extremes on the right."
While he said his book, From the Embassy: An American Foreign Policy Primer, was not meant to be a critique of Irish foreign policy, it does criticise Ireland for being "the only country in the civilised world which did not support the coalition" in the 1991 Gulf War.
