'The worst culprits are the "right on's" who spout jingoistic crap and call it liberal and open minded. The asssumption is that if you abhor everything american that therefore you represent everything "right on", like tolerance, respect, understanding, political and cultural intelligence and sensitivity.

These lazy "liberals" are happy and confident that their left wing trendy stance is fully and adequately supported by the proclamation that they "hate america".'

Spot on, lox. And I speak, as I said earlier, as someone of very left-wing persuasions myself.

At the university where I used to teach we had an event as part of a festival that I ran a couple of years ago. Hosted by Ziauddin Sardar, it was called something like "Why Everyone Hates America". I expected an enlightened discussion about America's transgressons, which still managed to perhaps look at some of the wider issues around cultural imperialism (and let's not forget that cultural imperialism was Britain's stock in trade for centuries).

But instead, Dr Sardar presented a series of scenarios outlining why America was shit, and all the horrible things it had been responsible for in recent decades, to the delight of the "right on" liberal crowd. In the discussion that followed came statements like, "Well, Americans don't know anything about other cultures because they never travel," to murmurs of approval from the assembled throng. I found myself getting progressively angrier - for one thing, I'd cheerfully compare my nearly-full passport with that of the average British person. Bet I'd win.

In the end, it was a smug, self-congratulatory hour of people absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, who couldn't make the pretty basic conceptual leap of comparing their own country's chequered past with the transgressions of contemporary America...and they were certainly not making a distinction between the American government and its people.

I made reference to the climate here after 9/11 - I'm telling you, it wasn't nice. On the day itself, I became aware that my colleagues were watching the unfoldng events in the staff room on television. I was on my way there, and our Operations manager headed me off and took me somewhere else saying, "You don't want to go in there." See, even as the towers were falling, there were people I worked with sitting in that room, watching thousands of innocent people suffering and dying, saying, "They had it coming." In the subsequent weeks I heard that sentiment more than once - usually before people realised I was American.

I'm not saying that every British person feels this way. But some certainly do.