An Open Letter to Paul Wolfowitz - "Court Jew

[Farouk Dindar]

In view of the recent developments with spy saga and
I am posting this letter here.

Josh will soon tell Wofwitz "I told you so!

Farouk Dindar

====================================

http://www.counterpunch.org/ruebner03142003.html

March 14, 2003

An Open Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

Dear Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,

I doubt it if you remember me. That's okay though. I don't think that I did
anything to merit drawing the attention of the dean as a graduate student at
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). I
was pretty bookish at SAIS and spent more than my share of time toiling over
economic models in the library. As the dean of SAIS, I am sure that you had
fleeting contact with hundreds of students like myself. I think that we shared
a few coffees together during your weekly breakfast meetings with students. I
thought that custom was classy and demonstrated the importance that you placed
on being in touch with us. I liked the fact that you invariably showed up at
our Friday afternoon Happy Hour ritual in the courtyard when we all unwound
after an intense week of studies.

The comfortable, accessible relationship that you had with your students at
SAIS makes it difficult for me to address you as the Assistant Secretary of
Defense of the United States of America. It sounds so formal and removed,
doesn't it? Yet I wouldn't have the audacity to call you by your first name
either. Perhaps, for the sake of this letter, I can simply call you "brother."
I hope that you do not take offense at this intimate appellation. But, you
see, I am not writing this letter as a secular American critic of a
unilateralist U.S. foreign policy that has run amok. Instead, I decided to
write to you as one fellow Jew to another. And as Jews, we do share that
intimate connection and shared sense of destiny even if we do not really know
each other. Perhaps in Hebrew school you learned the dictum kol yisrael arevim
zeh la'zeh-that all Jews are responsible for and to each other. It is in this
spirit of mutual responsibility that I write to you.

Brother, I am concerned about you. I am concerned that you are being exploited
and that you do not realize it. Before you discard my pro-peace,
anti-imperialism views about the war in Iraq as the ranting of an aberrant
SAIS student who somehow escaped from the school's neo-conservative
straitjacket, I plead with you to engage in chesbon nefesh-that powerful,
beautiful Jewish tradition of "soul accounting" in which we engage during the
High Holidays. Before the bombs start falling on the long-suffering, innocent
civilians of Baghdad, please look into your heart and ask yourself honestly
whose interests you are serving by being such a visible symbol of this policy.

Lately I have come to the disturbing conclusion that the Bush Administration
is using you as its "court Jew" par excellence. Rest assured, this is not a
term that I learned during my studies at SAIS. Rather I picked it up in the
course of my involvement with the Jewish peace movement which is calling
simultaneously for an end to Israel's self-destructive military occupation of
Palestine and is helping to mobilize the millions of good-hearted Americans
who have taken to the streets to protest the war of aggression that the Bush
Administration is pedaling.

"Court Jew" is a term that originates in the context of anti-Semitism in
"enlightened" Europe. On that blood-soaked continent, the reigning monarchs
and other despotic rulers thought up an ingenious system to perpetuate their
oppressive systems of government. These shrewd, Machiavellian rulers made a
psychologically brilliant pact with an elite, assimilationist group of Jewish
subjects who craved nothing more than acceptance by the power structure of
society. Often, these ambitious Jews were so eager to serve the interests of
the rulers so that they could ease their feelings of internalized self-hatred.
They viewed serving the power structure as a way to overcome the marginality
and stigmas associated with being Jewish which were built into the very fabric
of society by the power structure to begin with. The rulers understood this
yearning to enter the halls of power and took advantage of it by dangling a
carrot of illusional power before the hungry eyes of this wayward Jewish
elite. These "court Jews" were given politically unimportant, yet highly
visible positions within the regime. Why? So that when the subjected masses
rose up from time to time in justified outrage at the oppressive nature of the
regime under which they lived, there was a convenient, ready-made scapegoat in
place. The "court Jew," as a highly visible symbol of the regime, served as
the lighting rod to bear the brunt of the blame and deflect criticism from
where it belonged rightfully. Brother, need I remind you how disastrous it was
for our people to be the target of this rage? I think that you would agree
that, in retrospect, it would have been better not to have played the fool for
those European monarchs.

But, alas, the tragic mistakes of history do tend to repeat themselves.
(Brother, it makes we wonder sometimes if the global community of human beings
is making "progress" toward anything worth progressing to.) Maybe you don't
see it coming, but I do. Your job is to interact in the high-brow world of
intelligence briefings and diplomacy. My job is to interact with the people
and mobilize them against the very steps that you're taking. With all due
respect, I think that I am in a better position to hear what the people are
saying. Do you know what they're saying already? That the war in Iraq is being
planned by a cabal of extremist Jews. That it is the first part of a Zionist
conspiracy to redraw the map of the Middle East. That Israel stands to be the
prime beneficiary of this war. And it's not just the marginalized skinheads
who are saying this either. It's also mainstream folks who would swear up and
down that they don't have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies. I'm sure that
you, like me, recoiled in horror when you heard Congressman Jim Moran assert
that it is the Jews who are advocating for this war and that only the Jews
have the power to stop it.

It pains me that so many of my fellow citizens are falling into this age-old
trap of blaming the powerless Jews who seem so powerful because of the
existence of a handful of "court Jews" who front for the power structure. This
doesn't mean that the "court Jews" of the unelected Jewish Establishment
haven't been hawking for this war. They have been. There is no denying that
Israel sent Benjamin Netanyahu to Capitol Hill to testify for the war in Iraq
and "convince" Members of Congress that it was in the interests of the United
States to let loose the dogs of war (as if they needed much convincing
anyway). All of this is true. This is the beauty of how the system works. Take
a few "court Jews" and give them unimpeded access to the mainstream media and,
voila, you create the impression among the masses that "the Jews" are spoiling
for a war. Do you see brother how you are misrepresenting us? I wish that we
in the Jewish peace movement could have as much access as you do to the
mainstream media so that we could shatter the monolithic view of the Jewish
community which the "court Jew" by definition is set up to propagate. Of
course, we are denied that access by the same power structure which has an
interest in making sure that yours is the only "Jewish" voice heard.

I'm really afraid that we are heading for a calamity. If the people are this
incensed now my brother, how do you think they will feel when American men and
women start returning from the sands of Kuwait in body bags? Who is going to
be blamed if, God forbid, we are subjected to another terrorist attack? Do
these thoughts keep you awake at night? Are you scared like I am that this
imperialistic war in Iraq threatens the existence of the Jewish people?

My brother, I don't blame you for accepting the starring role of "court Jew."
It must be a pretty amazing feeling to convince yourself that you have as much
power as everybody says that you do. I hope that I never get close enough to
the power structure of this crumbling, decrepit empire to get a taste of it.
In my humble opinion, there is only one honorable thing that you can do to
undo the shameful damage that you have caused already: resign. For the sake of
your own dignity, you must refuse to be exploited as the "court Jew." Step
down and deprive the power structure of its "court Jew" and you will expose to
the world the actors who really motivate the Bush Administration. Please,
before it is too late, tell the world that it is not the powerless Jews who
are pushing for this war, but the greedy, venal barons of corporate America
who stand to profit while cowering behind the myth of the all-powerful Jew.
Tell everybody what you and I both know. That the real interests hawking for
this war are the defense contractors and the oil industry who will make
billions of dollars to first destroy Iraq and then "rebuild" it under the
protective wing of American "democracy." And, while you're at it, please tell
the world that the $100 billion the Bush Administration will require to pay
the military-industrial complex to finance this war of aggression will be
sucked from the wallets of the impoverished American working class which is
systematically being stripped of government services by this rapacious regime.

I am not the type of Jew who generally bases his opinions on whether a
particular action "is good for the Jews." I would like to believe that I have
a more embracing, holistic view of humanity. Maybe it even seems self-centered
to worry about what will happen to the Jews because of this war when thousands
of innocent Iraqis stand to die in order for the United States to "liberate"
their country. I confess though that I'm worried and I don't know what else to
do with my fear except express it. Brother, it seems to me to be so painfully
obvious that this war will benefit no one but the corporate interests I
mentioned above. Not Jews, not Americans, not Israelis, not Iraqis, and not
Palestinians.

If I've sparked even a sliver of doubt in your mind as to the wisdom of the
course you are pursuing, please call me and we can get together for a cup of
coffee over breakfast. It will be just like the good old days at SAIS.

With love,

Josh Ruebner

Josh Ruebner is co-founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel (JPPI)
and a former Analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service
(CRS). He can be reached: jrue...@hotmail.com

To My Former Dean and Other "Court Jews"
by JOSH RUEBNER

[clark wilkins]

"Farouk Dindar" <spamf...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:lqRYc.2571$H23....@newscontent-01.sprint.ca...

Why do people think Paul Wolfowitz is a neocon?

>
> Lately I have come to the disturbing conclusion that the Bush
Administration
> is using you as its "court Jew" par excellence.

Paul Wolfowitz is the highest ranking Jew in America today - excluding
Zionist I. Irving Libby. He is not a "court Jew". He earned his position.
Don't judge him by the company he keeps. He appointed none of the Zionist
nutcases running loose in the Pentagon who are daily looking for some new
"enemy" of Israel's for America to blow up. When they fall, he won't fall
with them.

He's guilty of rigging the war against Iraq - But consider the temptation.
You're viewing it now with 20-20 hindsight. He saw an opportunity in Iraq
and he took it. How many amongst us thought it might work? He did too.

No. I didn't foresee it as working. I had 20-20 foresight. I knew Bernard
Lewis was a fraud (The Saudis had already exposed him but the Zionists, in
their fanatiscism, wouldn't listen. But who believes a Saudi?). I knew Feith
was an idiot. I knew Anwar Chalabi was an Israeli puppet. Does that make me
smarter than Wolfowitz?
On that one issue, yes. But otherwise, he's no fool.

If you want to pass judgement on Wolfowitz, look and see what he does now
that his gamble has lost? Is he defending Feith and his fellow Pentagon
traitors? Is he forcing Chalabi down the Iraqis throats?

Wolfowitz is, first and foremost, a political thinker. He made a gamble that
failed. If you want to judge him, judge him by what he does next.

>Rest assured, this is not a
> term that I learned during my studies at SAIS. Rather I picked it up in
the
> course of my involvement with the Jewish peace movement which is calling
> simultaneously for an end to Israel's self-destructive military occupation
of
> Palestine and is helping to mobilize the millions of good-hearted
Americans
> who have taken to the streets to protest the war of aggression that the
Bush
> Administration is pedaling.
>
> "Court Jew" is a term that originates in the context of anti-Semitism in
> "enlightened" Europe. On that blood-soaked continent, the reigning
monarchs
> and other despotic rulers thought up an ingenious system to perpetuate
their
> oppressive systems of government. These shrewd, Machiavellian

Michael Ledeen, Feith's current Pentagon defender, is a follower of
Machiavelli.

>rulers made a
> psychologically brilliant pact with an elite, assimilationist group of
Jewish
> subjects who craved nothing more than acceptance by the power structure of
> society. Often, these ambitious Jews were so eager to serve the interests
of
> the rulers so that they could ease their feelings of internalized
self-hatred.
> They viewed serving the power structure as a way to overcome the
marginality
> and stigmas associated with being Jewish which were built into the very
fabric
> of society by the power structure to begin with. The rulers understood
this
> yearning to enter the halls of power and took advantage of it by dangling
a
> carrot of illusional power before the hungry eyes of this wayward Jewish
> elite. These "court Jews" were given politically unimportant, yet highly
> visible positions within the regime. Why?

Wolfowitz has more political power that Donald Rumsfeld. Do you think
Rumsfeld runs the Pentagon? Wolfowitz does.

And what part of that description is innacurrate?

>That it is the first part of a Zionist
> conspiracy to redraw the map of the Middle East.

Is Ariel Sharon a Zionist conspiring to redraw the lines of the Middle
Easst?

> That Israel stands to be the
> prime beneficiary of this war.

Hmmm! Now who has said that before?
Oh! I know! ME!

> And it's not just the marginalized skinheads
> who are saying this either. It's also mainstream folks who would swear up
and
> down that they don't have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.

/;^)

> I'm sure that
> you, like me, recoiled in horror when you heard Congressman Jim Moran
assert
> that it is the Jews who are advocating for this war and that only the Jews
> have the power to stop it.

Unfortunately, Jews do not have the power to stop it.

>
> It pains me that so many of my fellow citizens are falling into this
age-old
> trap of blaming the powerless Jews who seem so powerful because of the
> existence of a handful of "court Jews" who front for the power structure.
This
> doesn't mean that the "court Jews" of the unelected Jewish Establishment
> haven't been hawking for this war. They have been.

Feith and OSP.
Tenet and the CIA.
Bolton and the State Department
Abram Shulsky and the NSC
Libby and VP Cheney
Perle and the Pentagon Advisory Board

> There is no denying that
> Israel sent Benjamin Netanyahu to Capitol Hill to testify for the war in
Iraq
> and "convince" Members of Congress that it was in the interests of the
United
> States to let loose the dogs of war (as if they needed much convincing
> anyway). All of this is true.

"A Clean Break" written by Douglas Feith.

>This is the beauty of how the system works. Take
> a few "court Jews" and give them unimpeded access to the mainstream media
and,
> voila, you create the impression among the masses that "the Jews" are
spoiling
> for a war.

A small minority were - And they pulled it off.

>Do you see brother how you are misrepresenting us? I wish that we
> in the Jewish peace movement could have as much access as you do to the
> mainstream media so that we could shatter the monolithic view of the
Jewish
> community which the "court Jew" by definition is set up to propagate. Of
> course, we are denied that access by the same power structure which has an
> interest in making sure that yours is the only "Jewish" voice heard.

True.

>
> I'm really afraid that we are heading for a calamity. If the people are
this
> incensed now my brother, how do you think they will feel when American men
and
> women start returning from the sands of Kuwait in body bags?

Or with their bodies full of "spent uranium"?
Investigations will be demanded. The guilty will be brought forward.
And they will all be Jewish. Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney will escape the net.
What will America conclude when the guilty traitors are all Jews? The ones
who falsified the intelligence on Iraq? And the ones who ordered the "spent
uranium" not to be cleaned up in Iraq, even though we cleaned it up in
Kuwait? The ones who said it was safe even after Douglass Rokke came back as
living proof it wasn't?

Jews are about to become very, very unpopular people once the truth comes
out - And all because of about 25 Zionists who actually achieved their
positions of power via the "Christian" Dick Cheney.
If a pogram were to take place in the US, Richard Perle has found the means
of setting it off.

>Who is going to
> be blamed if, God forbid, we are subjected to another terrorist attack? Do
> these thoughts keep you awake at night? Are you scared like I am that this
> imperialistic war in Iraq threatens the existence of the Jewish people?
>
> My brother, I don't blame you for accepting the starring role of "court
Jew."
> It must be a pretty amazing feeling to convince yourself that you have as
much
> power as everybody says that you do. I hope that I never get close enough
to
> the power structure of this crumbling, decrepit empire to get a taste of
it.
> In my humble opinion, there is only one honorable thing that you can do to
> undo the shameful damage that you have caused already: resign.

Resign and expose Feith and Cheney.

>For the sake of
> your own dignity, you must refuse to be exploited as the "court Jew." Step
> down and deprive the power structure of its "court Jew" and you will
expose to
> the world the actors who really motivate the Bush Administration. Please,
> before it is too late, tell the world that it is not the powerless Jews
who
> are pushing for this war, but the greedy, venal barons of corporate
America
> who stand to profit while cowering behind the myth of the all-powerful
Jew.
> Tell everybody what you and I both know. That the real interests hawking
for
> this war are the defense contractors and the oil industry who will make
> billions of dollars to first destroy Iraq and then "rebuild" it under the
> protective wing of American "democracy." And, while you're at it, please
tell
> the world that the $100 billion the Bush Administration will require to
pay
> the military-industrial complex to finance this war of aggression will be
> sucked from the wallets of the impoverished American working class which
is
> systematically being stripped of government services by this rapacious
regime.

When Americans see their taxes go up and their Social Security go down,
they're going to want to know why - And Ralph Nader will be standing by,
ready to tell them and Ted Turner will be running the camera.

>
> I am not the type of Jew who generally bases his opinions on whether a
> particular action "is good for the Jews." I would like to believe that I
have
> a more embracing, holistic view of humanity. Maybe it even seems
self-centered
> to worry about what will happen to the Jews because of this war when
thousands
> of innocent Iraqis stand to die in order for the United States to
"liberate"
> their country.

We're going to liberate them if we have to kill every last one of them.

>I confess though that I'm worried and I don't know what else to
> do with my fear except express it. Brother, it seems to me to be so
painfully
> obvious that this war will benefit no one but the corporate interests I
> mentioned above.

There are no corporate interests behind Iraq - Not even the Carlyle Group.

>Not Jews, not Americans, not Israelis, not Iraqis, and not
> Palestinians.
>
> If I've sparked even a sliver of doubt in your mind as to the wisdom of
the
> course you are pursuing, please call me and we can get together for a cup
of
> coffee over breakfast. It will be just like the good old days at SAIS.
>
> With love,
>
> Josh Ruebner
>
> Josh Ruebner is co-founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel
(JPPI)
> and a former Analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research
Service
> (CRS). He can be reached: jrue...@hotmail.com
>
>

I sent him a copy of this. I wish him luck and may God bless.

::Clark::

[Farouk Dindar]

>> Josh Ruebner
>>
>> Josh Ruebner is co-founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel
>(JPPI)
>> and a former Analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research
>Service
>> (CRS). He can be reached: jrue...@hotmail.com
>>
>>
>
>I sent him a copy of this. I wish him luck and may God bless.
>
>
>::Clark::
>

Hi Clark

Thanks for that very informative response.

I learned a lot from it.

Farouk Dindar

[kuff (Isaac Adams)]

"clark wilkins" <clwi...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:10j8f55...@corp.supernews.com...

>
> "Farouk Dindar" <spamf...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
> news:lqRYc.2571$H23....@newscontent-01.sprint.ca...
>> In view of the recent developments with spy saga and
>> I am posting this letter here.
>>
>> Josh will soon tell Wofwitz "I told you so!
>>
>>
>> Farouk Dindar
>>
>> ====================================
>>
>> http://www.counterpunch.org/ruebner03142003.html
>>

...

>
>
> Jews are about to become very, very unpopular people once the truth comes
> out - And all because of about 25 Zionists who actually achieved their
> positions of power via the "Christian" Dick Cheney.
> If a pogram were to take place in the US, Richard Perle has found the means
> of setting it off.

Bingo. A moderate economic decline and/or a public retreat from Iraq and the
shit will hit the fan.

>
...

[Count 1]

> No. I didn't foresee it as working. I had 20-20 foresight. I knew Bernard
> Lewis was a fraud (The Saudis had already exposed him but the Zionists, in
> their fanatiscism, wouldn't listen. But who believes a Saudi?).

Bernard Lewis is a fraud because 'the saudis' exposed him?

Explain that statement please. Bernard Lewis is one of the worlds most
respected, most widely read, most prolific, scholars of Islamic history.

How is he a fraud?

[clark wilkins]

"Count 1" <omnipi...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:2pjj87F...@uni-berlin.de...

Lewis, the former Jewish British intelligence operative, was relatively
unknown until 9-11. His views on democratising Muslims were then championed
by Paul Wolfowitz and Woolsey. To publicize his theory, the Zionist nutcases
hired Benador Associates to do his PR work.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/818

Benador was already representing Zionist nutcases Richard Perle, Woolsey,
Michael Ledeen,
Frank Gaffney, Michael Rubin, A.M. Rosenthal, Kanan Makiya and Khidhir
Hamza (of Chalabi's INC), Judith Miller (source of false NYT stories on
Iraq), Laurie Mylroie, David Wurmser, Martin Kramer (an editor for Daniel
Pipes), John O'Sullivan (editor, National Review), Charles Krauthammer, and,
on one occasssion, Daniel Pipes, himself.

Did any of the above clients of Benador help promote Bernard Lewis as being
what you describe "one of the worlds most respected, most widely read, most
prolific, scholars of Islamic history"?

The following Benador neocon nutcase clients have promoted Lewis:

1) Richard Perle
2) Michael Ledeen
3) James Woolsey
4) Frank Gaffney
5) Daniel Pipes
6) Kanan Makiya
7) Judith Miller
8) Charles Krauthammer
9) Martin Kramer
10) Laurie Mylroie

I couldn't find where Michael Rubin or Wurmser promoted Lewis, but I did
find where Lewis promoted both Rubin and Wurmser.

It would seem that Lewis gets his "rave reviews" from a very limited and
single minded audience. Here's my challenge. Find a nationally known person
that says Bernard Lewis is "one of the world's most respected, most widely
read, most prolific, scholars of Islamic history" and I'll show you a Likuud
supporter.

Or better yet, find a non-Jewish Islamic scholar who agrees with him. Or is
Lewis the only Islamic historian in the entire world?

>
> How is he a fraud?

He over simplifies, ignores contradiction, and has no else confirming his
work. The Saudis were shown his ideas for democratising Iraq post-Saddam
Insane and they allowed their religious experts to review it and the
concluded it would not work. Their criticisms went ignored.

But there is no greater expose of Lewis than his own work. He wrote of
democratzing Iraq back in 2002, making his predictions which included
Iranians overthrowing their gov't and "dancing in the streets" - a
prediction he repeated for the Iraqis when Saddam toppled. They've been
mostly proven wrong. Nor will he admit his mistakes. The US has called for
UN help in Iraq after the Lewis inspired policies of Paul Wolfowitz failed.
And what are Lewis' thoughts on that? On May 12, 2004, in the WSJ he said:

"The UN is likely to botch the job in Iraq".

Yet in that same articlehe failed to make one single sugestion for what the
US should do.
His ONE MAN theory has run out of gas.

Others have noted his mistakes as well. Here's a published criticism of his
work:

Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? is a very bad book from a usually very good
author. How a profoundly learned and highly respected historian, whose
career spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge of muddled
thinking, inaccurate assertions and one-sided punditry is a profound
mystery. While I cannot hope to resolve the puzzle, I can explain why I come
to this conclusion.

Lewis never defines his terms, and he paints with a brush so broad that he
may as well have brought a broom to the easel. He begins by speaking of the
"Islamic world," and of "what went wrong" with it. He contrasts this culture
region to "the West," and implies that things went right with the latter.
But what does he mean by the "Islamic world?" He seldom speaks of the
Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who form a very substantial proportion
of the whole. Malaysia and Indonesia are never instanced. He seems to mean
"the Muslim Middle East," but if so he would have been better advised to say
so. With regard to the Middle East, what does he mean by the question "what
went wrong?" Does he mean to ask about economic underdevelopment? About lack
of democracy? About a failure to contribute to scientific and technological
advances? About ethnocentrism? All of these themes are mentioned in passing,
but none is formulated as a research design. If "what went wrong" was mainly
economic, political and scientific, then why pose the question with regard
to a religious category? Lewis straightforwardly says that Islam in and of
itself cannot be blamed for what went wrong (whatever that was). Since Islam
is not the independent variable in his explanation, why make "the Islamic
world" the unit of analysis? Discerning exactly what Lewis is attempting to
explain, and what he thinks the variables are that might explain it, is like
trying to nail jelly to the wall.

Lewis has a tendency to lump things under a broad rubric together that are
actually diverse and perhaps not much related to one another. Speaking of
classical "Islam," presumably about 632-1258, Lewis says that the "armies"
of "Islam" "at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa, India
and China" (p. 6). Here he makes it sound as though "Islam" was a single
unit with a unified military. Later, (p. 12) he actually speaks of the
Crusaders' successes impressing "Muslim war departments," as if medieval
institutions were so reified. In fact, Moroccan Berbers fighting in Spain
are highly unlikely even to have known about the Turkic raids down into
India. Nor is it clear that those Turks were motivated primarily by Islam
(pastoralists have been invading India from Central Asia for millennia).
Moreover, tribal alliances across religious boundaries bring into question
the firmness of the military boundaries suggested by speaking of "Islam."
Even the early Ottoman conquests in Anatolia were accomplished in part
through alliances with Christians. Finally, much of the advance of Islam
occurred quite peacefully, through Sufi missionary work for example.

When discussing some European fears of the Ottomans (p. 9), Lewis lets it
slip that the Iranian Safavids sought alliances with the Europeans against
their Ottoman enemies. Lewis does not tell us that the Ottomans also made
Protestant alliances in the Balkans against Catholic powers. Since Europeans
were fighting amongst themselves, and Muslim powers were fighting amongst
themselves, and each was willing to make tactical alliances across religious
boundaries, it is not clear what is gained by setting up a dichotomy in the
early modern period between the "West" and "Islam."

When speaking of Ottoman military weakness, Lewis generally skips over the
brilliant fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Ottomans won wars in
Europe handily in part because they quickly took up field artillery and
their Janissary infantry was an early adopter of the matchlock. Military
historians do not think central and western European armies began having a
technological and organizational advantage over the Ottomans until after
1680. From Lewis's account here one would have thought that the Ottomans
were all along somehow backward.

When Lewis does speak of the military advances of the Europeans in the 18th
century, he does not specify what they were, and he does not say why the
Ottomans failed to adapt, merely noting the failure. Comparative historians
have long held that Western Europe was innovative in warfare and technology
in this period because it consisted of many small states constantly at war
with one another. Many small states, moreover, could not stifle innovation
or impose censorship effectively, since if only one broke ranks the
innovation could be introduced. Large empires such as those of the Ottomans,
the Mughals and the Qing tended to be more complacent, simply because they
faced fewer powerful challenges. The Mughals never much improved their
casting of cannon over two centuries, for instance, because it was perfectly
serviceable against the rebellious clans they faced. And the regulatory
power of these great empires was vast. Lewis, by neglecting to discuss such
social and structural explanations, implicitly displaces the question onto
character or culture. The Ottomans were hidebound, he implies, because
Muslims look askance at learning from the infidel. How such an explanation
could hold given the innovations adopted by the Ottoman military in the
sixteenth century is not clear.

Lewis repeats his often stated contrast between curious Europeans who
established chairs in Arabic and tried to learn about the Orient, and
remarkably self-satisfied Muslims who did not interest themselves in the
outside world. In fact, the primary impetus for the study of Arabic in
Europe until the twentieth century was that it helped in deciphering
biblical Hebrew, a matter of interest to European Christians for internal
reasons. Further, since al-Biruni learned Sanskrit to write about India,
Shahristani created an encyclopedia of the world religions, and Qadi `Abd
al-Jabbar and many other Muslim theologians engaged at length with Christian
doctrine, Lewis cannot mean to suggest that such a lack of curiosity was
characteristic of Islam or Muslims all along. He must surely mean to say
that after 1492 there was relatively little such curiosity.

In fact, after that date the Spanish Inquisition forcibly converted hundreds
of thousands of Muslims in Andalusia and ruthlessly executed the
recalcitrant. The Andalusians had been key transmitters of knowledge between
civilizations, and now they were gone. The eminent medieval historian R. I.
Moore has called Europe in this period "the persecuting society." In the age
of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions the sort of access Muslims would have
needed to Europe for a study program in Occidentalism was largely denied
them. (Lewis admits this briefly on p. 42 but elsewhere keeps blaming
Muslims for being unduly insular in this regard!) They were confined to a
few trading enclaves in places like Venice, and even there a debate raged
about whether they should be allowed. In contrast, Christian Europeans lived
freely in Muslim lands. Rather than blaming Muslims for knowing so little of
Europe in the age of the Inquisitions and the Wars of Religion, one might
well view that continent as isolated from the rest of the world in that
period by its own paroxysms of religious intolerance. Lewis notes abstract
juridical reasoning by muftis about whether a Muslim should live in a state
ruled by non-Muslims (the jurists said "no"), but does not take into account
realities on the ground. Real Muslims in fact paid no attention to such
strictures when living under Christian rule in southern Spain before 1492.
Muslims also lived under Hindu and later British rule in India despite what
jurists may have said.

Lewis creates a problematic West/Islam dichotomy virtually everywhere. When
he comes to Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the expulsion of the
French in 1801, he says that "the French were forced to leave - not by the
Egyptians nor by their Turkish Suzerains, but by a squadron of the Royal
Navy . . ." In fact, the Egyptian populace revolted more than once against
French rule, and the British and the Ottomans allied to expel the French
from Egypt. While the role of the British navy was pivotal, significant
Ottoman land forces at Akka and in Egypt also fought crucial battles that
helped convince the French to surrender. A joint British-Ottoman military
alliance to expel the French, however, complicates the story he wants to
tell. The Ottomans are reduced to the burghers of Hamelin, forced to call
upon a British pied piper who would rid them of the French rats. In fact,
the British needed the Ottoman alliance against the French to protect their
Indian routes as much as the Ottomans needed the British.

In discussing nineteenth-century Muslim responses to the new superiority of
Europe, Lewis says that they could not consider science and philosophy the
secret of success because they reduced philosophy to the handmaiden of
theology. Yet, it is the hallmark of the thought of the Egyptian Rifa`ah
al-Tahtawi (1801-1873) that he views European advances in "practical
philosophy" to be the major reason for their flourishing civilization.
Similar views were held by Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. It is
unaccountable that Lewis does not know this. Lewis goes on to discuss
attempts to found factories in the Middle East, and simply says "the effort
failed, and most of the early factories became derelict" (p. 47). He
maintains that these efforts were largely aimed at equipping armies. While
it is true that the Egyptian textile industries ultimately failed, at their
height they employed some 40,000 workers and were involved in rather more
than making uniforms. Later silk factories in Lebanon were also highly
successful for a period of thirty or forty years. Debate rages as to why
early attempts at industrialization failed in the Middle East in the long
run. Some blame the restrictions European powers placed on tariffs in the
treaties of 1838 and 1840, while others point to Egypt's lack of coal for
energy, and of trained mechanics who could perform maintenance on the
imported machines. Middle Eastern silk industries fell behind Europe in part
because Pasteur invented a way of quarantining healthy silkworms against
diseased ones, while Lebanese and Iranian worms suffered from such
outbreaks. Lewis here as elsewhere attempts no explanation, simply noting
the failure of industrialization in the region.

He then adds that "later attempts to catch up with the Industrial Revolution
fared little better" (p. 47), linking the present-day with the 1840s without
any segue. In fact, the 1960s and after witnessed extensive
industrialization in the Middle East. The decade of the 1960s saw a
substantial rise in living standards for Egyptians, after a wage stagnation
1910-1950. Everywhere in the region industry now makes up a significant part
of local economies, which are no longer primarily agricultural. Light
textiles have been a relative success story in Turkey and even in Pakistan.
There are real problems with the economies of the Middle East, but to say
that the development efforts of the past fifty years have been no more
successful than those of the nineteenth century is frankly bizarre. That the
rise of Israel put pressure on Arab budgets, when a different sort of
neighbor might have allowed them to invest the money in more fruitful areas
than the military, is never considered. Among the biggest problems for
Middle Eastern economies have been high rates of population growth, which
Lewis does not even mention. That is, Pakistan's economy has grown a
respectable 5 percent per annum or so in the past twenty years, rather
better than Hindu India's 3 percent, but the population growth rate is so
great that the per capita increase remains small in both countries.
Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country, has done even better than Pakistan
economically, and does not have a similar population problem. Lewis does not
mention Muslim countries like Malaysia. He is not writing analytical history
here, with a view to explaining particular problems by isolating independent
variables. He is writing moral history, which is tautological. He seems to
insist on erasing any successes they have had, and to imply that the Muslims
have failed because they are failures.

The supercilious air of the bemused put-down suffuses this book. Lewis tells
us that it is "sadly appropriate" that the first telegraph sent from the
Middle East to the outside world concerned a military event, the fall of
Sebastopol. He adds, with drop-dead timing, that "it is also sadly
appropriate in that it was inaccurate; it hadn't yet fallen" (p. 51). What
sort of history writing is this? The clear implication is that the important
news about the Middle East has for some time been military. The other clear
implication is that the military news coming out of the region is full of
falsehoods. The use of clever asides to create such a latticework of calumny
has more in common with the techniques of propaganda than with academic
history. Has Europe witnessed fewer wars than the Middle East in the past
two centuries? Surely the comparative death toll from wars is about 100 to
one in that period in Europe's favor. Even the Crimean War, the butt of the
joke, was primarily a European conflict in which France and Britain objected
to Russia's aggressive invasion of the Principalities (Romania) and riposted
with Ottoman help in Russia's Crimea. As for the inaccuracy, it was more
premature than false. It is not clear that Middle Eastern wars generate more
lies and propaganda than other wars, in any case. Truth is the first
casualty of war, the saying goes. It does not specify "Middle Eastern war."

Lewis virtually ignores European colonization of the modern Middle East. He
alleges (p. 153) that it was "comparatively brief and ended half a century
ago." The French ruled Algeria 1830 to 1962. The British were in what is now
Bangladesh from 1757 to 1947. While Britain only formally ruled Egypt 1882
to 1922, it was already making and breaking its rulers in the 1870s, and
continued to play a heavy-handed role in Egyptian politics and in the Suez
Canal until 1956. Radical Islamism was first provoked to terrorism in Egypt
precisely by the arrogance of British power there, beginning a genealogy of
violence that leads through Ayman al-Zawahiri directly to September 11,
2001. In a marvelous bit of misdirection, Lewis praises the "Chamber of
Deputies" that British colonial administrators allowed to the Egyptians,
which was merely an ineffectual debating society. He neglects to inform the
reader that in 1880-1881 a popular Egyptian movement arose that imposed on
the dictatorial Ottoman governor a real parliament with the purview of
budgetary oversight, and that in 1882 the British invaded to overthrow this
democratic experiment and put the autocratic Khedive back on his throne as
their puppet. In any case, Franco-British involvement in the Middle East was
not "brief." If we include various forms of economic imperialism with actual
colonization, the period would be even longer.

Nor is the length of European rule the only important factor. How deeply did
they affect the local economy and society? The French powerfully shaped
Algeria in ways that certainly contribute to its current travails, including
substantial expropriation of land from owners and peasants and the creation
of a comprador bourgeoisie. While one certainly cheers the British for
giving refuge in Palestine to Jews fleeing Hitler, it would have been nobler
yet to admit them to the British Isles rather than saddling a small, poor
peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make the place their own.
Nor was it a good idea, having created such a situation, to simply leave and
let the two populations fight it out. The British exit from South Asia was
similarly botched, leaving us with the Kashmir dispute as a nuclear
flashpoint. Lewis's attempt to virtually erase two centuries of European
imperialism and all its long-term consequences with a wave of the hand is
breathtaking. Nor did all significant decolonization end half a century ago.
The French did not leave Algeria until 1962, and the British did not leave
the Persian Gulf until 1969.

Lewis repeats the tired saw (p. 62) that there was widespread support in the
Middle East for fascism in the 1930s. That some urban groups admired
Mussolini in particular is true, but they were hardly "widespread," and not
all of them were Muslim. Young Egypt, a minor fascist-inspired party, had
its analogue in the Phalange Party of some Maronite Christians in Lebanon,
and later on in the Stern Gang and other Revisionist Zionist movements.
Israel Gershoni has shown that Egyptian mainstream intellectuals roundly
condemned fascism in the 1930s. Moreover, since the vast majority of Middle
Easterners at the time were illiterate peasants, and the transistor radio
had not yet been invented, the likelihood is that most of them had never
heard of fascism or Mussolini, much less leaning toward them. Lewis alleges
that "Muslims developed no secularist movement of their own" (p. 103). It is
difficult to understand what this could possibly mean. Obviously, if he is
referring to believing Muslims, they would not be secularists. If he means
persons of Muslim background, then the secularist wing of Iran's National
Front in the 1940s and 1950s was developed by Muslims; the secularist
policies of Muhammad Reza Pahlevi were developed by his circle of Muslim
technocrats; Turkey's secularist movement was developed and promoted by
Muslims; and although the Baath Party was initially the brainchild of
Christian Arabs, its secularist ideology was taken up with alacrity by
Syrian and Iraqi Muslims in large numbers. Nor is it true that a separation
of religion and state never occurred in Islam, in contrast to Christianity.
Ira Lapidus dates such a separation from the classical period of Islamic
civilization.

A final question has to do with Europe, the explicit contrast for the Muslim
Middle East in this book. Why does he think things "went right" in the West?
I should have thought that the slaughter of World War I, the rise of fascism
and communism, the 61 million butchered in World War II, the savage European
repression of anticolonial movements in places like Vietnam and Algeria, and
the hundreds of millions held hostage by the Cold War nuclear doctrine of
"mutually assured destruction" - that all this might have raised at least a
few eyebrows among emeriti historians looking for things that went wrong. It
is true that the East Asian and European economies have flourished in the
past 50 years under a Pax Americana, but this development hardly seems
intrinsic to the West as a whole. Political and economic instability
relentlessly stalked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and
it was divided against itself in a bitter ideological battle for much of the
second half. That is, even the Western European efflorescence of recent
decades took place against the backdrop of a deadly Cold War that could have
wiped us all out in an instant. In contrast to the massive death toll racked
up by Europeans in the past century, Muslim powers in the second half of the
twentieth century have probably killed only a little more than a million
persons in war (mainly in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s). The Middle East
has its problems and Muslims have theirs. Lewis's analytical views of what
those problems are, why they have come about, and how to resolve them, would
have been most welcome, given his vast erudition. Instead, he has chosen to
play a different role in this book.

Professor Juan R. I. Cole is based in the Department of History, University
of Michigan.

Here's another critic:

The Warped World of Bernard Lewis
They Can't Tell Time
and They Don't Like Music

by Anis Shivani

Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.
By Bernard Lewis.
Oxford University Press. 180 pages. $23.

Bernard Lewis, leading Orientalist and Professor Emeritus at Princeton, has
been in great demand by the American media for his expert opinion since
9/11. Lewis was the one who originally coined the odious term, "clash of
civilizations," in his supercilious Atlantic Monthly article of September
1990, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." This article appeared after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and preparatory to identifying the new enemy. In that
article, Lewis rejects all the obvious explanations--failures of American
policy, for instance--and looks for "something deeper" that "makes every
problem insoluble," without identifying what that something deeper could be.
He dismisses imperialism as an explanation for "rage" and "humiliation,"
suggesting that anti-imperialism has a religious connotation. He asserts
that Muslims hate the United States, despite the United States never having
"ruled any Muslim population," ignoring the tentacles of the vast unseen
empire. He remarks how various strategies of adapting Western ideas and
influences have all failed--without offering any explanation why, or even
pausing to reflect on it--and then moves on, without a logical transition,
to how this has now become a mode of "hostility and rejection."

In a sense, the present book is a false advertisement for filling this
unspoken gap, but it builds on nothing but generalities such as the uniquely
explosive nature of Muslim rage. To Charlie Rose, Lewis recently said that
asking Arafat to give up terrorism is like asking Tiger Woods to give up
golf, that Bush was right to paint Iran and Iraq as part of the axis of
evil, and that Saddam Hussein will use weapons of mass destruction if he
gets them. To NPR's Robert Siegel, Lewis made the claim that Muslims are
finding it difficult to engage in the question of what went wrong and why
because of lack of free discussion (we should relieve them of that
responsibility). RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec recommended on July 10 to the
Defense Policy Board that we should take over Saudi Arabian oil fields and
assets, because their oil wealth funds extremism around the
world--essentially, because we don't agree with their worldview. To Brian
Lamb, Lewis rehearsed a mostly similar argument: "get tough" with them. The
academic veneer comes off sometimes.

In books like The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey
(1961), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), The Jews of Islam (1984), and Islam
and the West (1993) Lewis has catalogued what he sees as the incurable
pathologies of the Islamic world in its suspended state of humiliation. In
his new book, Lewis opens his account of "what went wrong" with the
beginning of Ottoman military setbacks in the sixteenth and later centuries.
Lewis's interpretation of Islam is heavily Ottomancentric, hardly dealing
with the substance of South Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, Persian
or North African civilization, and yet he extrapolates to the whole world of
Islam through all of time. Muslim intellect dictated narrow imitations in
military and other practical Western innovations, without understanding the
cultural substance behind these advances.

After the Ottoman defeat at the second siege of Vienna, and the subsequent
signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz, the Ottomans learned only that they had
to acquire Western weaponry, and "resort to that strange art we call
diplomacy, by which they tried, through political means, to modify, or even
to reduce the results of the military outcome." Being stronger than European
military powers for some considerable time, of course the Ottomans had
little need to resort to diplomatic maneuvers. But Lewis's approach is to
take some Muslim attitude that was a product of their economic, military,
and political supremacy, and generalize that there is some deficiency of
mind that would not allow them to want to learn. It took a good couple of
centuries for Muslims to understand how far behind the West they had fallen;
the thread running through the book is that Muslims picked up their lessons
from Western modernity too little and too late. In Lewis's account, after
the Reformation and Renaissance all the lending has to be in one direction
only, from West to East. Muslims extracted only the superficial, it never
penetrated deep within their psyche, and besides, it didn't fit in with
their culture. The implication is that this process of borrowing is futile
in the end. They'll never quite get it.

Lewis's view is that for centuries Muslims have felt humiliated, and at the
same time not known what to do about it. Therefore, when they ask the
question, What went wrong?, they often really mean, Who do we blame? It has
ever been so and ever will be so. The Ottomans may have asked "What did we
do wrong?" and thus given the impression of introspection, but really their
mind was not capable of grasping the extent of change (Westernization) that
needed to be undergone. So the answer often boiled down to a return to pure
Islam. That is what afflicted the Middle East in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and that is what afflicts it now. The Muslim mind is
unchanging in its reaction to the West.

For Lewis, Muslims have always suffered from a fatal lack of curiosity about
the West. Yes, they traveled to Western lands, but when they did so they had
a condescending attitude toward the infidels. In contrast, visitors from the
West have a long tradition of engaging in fruitful comparison of cultures:

Western captives in the East who escaped or were ransomed and returned home
produced a considerable literature telling of their adventures, of the lands
they had seen and the people they had met in the mysterious Orient. Middle
Eastern captives in the West who found their way home for the most part
remained silent, nor was there any great interest in the few accounts that
survived. The Occident remained even more mysterious than the Orient, and it
aroused no equivalent curiosity. The different mutual perceptions were
vividly expressed in their attitudes to each other's languages. The study of
Eastern languages was intensively pursued in the European universities and
elsewhere by scholars who came to be known as Orientalists, on the analogy
of Hellenists and Latinists. Until a comparatively recent date, there were
no Occidentalists in the Orient.

That is the crux of the matter. Muslims were unwilling to learn European
languages, and by extension, European literature and arts. This makes them
incapable of realizing freedom and democracy even when they embark on
political reform, introducing parliaments and elections and such, and
incapable of achieving gender equality, despite legal reforms aimed to do
that. Here is the great flaw in Muslim civilization since the rise of the
West: they have not produced great Occidentalist scholars. This is no minor
point. It seeps into all of Lewis's analysis.

For every one of the inadequacies of learning that Lewis points out, he
notes that in the eighteenth or nineteenth or twentieth centuries the pace
picked up quite a bit; in many instances he implies that the process of
adaptation went as far and as fast as it could have gone. And yet this was
never enough, for reasons that Lewis doesn't care to explain. His constant
refrain is: They weren't in the game at the time the West was undertaking
some new innovation: time clocks or polyphonous music or whatever; they came
to it late, not knowing the full importance of the innovation; eventually,
they recognized how important it was, and engaged in a mad-cap effort to
make themselves change; but this never worked in the end, because . . .Well,
we never get the "because." The "because" would have to deal with the whole
realm of actual Western and Islamic political, cultural, and economic
interaction during the last four centuries, and actual Islamic attempts at
modernization, industrialization, and liberalism--such messy business as
colonialism and neocolonialism. This is outside Lewis's frame of analysis.
He would rather rely on obscure Ottoman texts with which he is exclusively
comfortable.

We learn that in the beginning the Ottomans (Muslims) may not have been so
interested in sending envoys to Europe. But "in the eighteenth century the
situation changed dramatically. Great numbers of such special envoys were
now sent, with instructions to observe and to learn and, more particularly,
to report on anything that might be useful to the Muslim state in coping
with its difficulties and confronting its enemies." Lewis acknowledges that
by the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman state was vigorously pursuing
the importation of Western experts in the new practical sciences, instead of
relying on earlier "adventurers," but we do not learn why this was not
enough. Lewis opens the book with a panoramic, exciting look at Ottoman
military dominance, to get our pulse going: What an exalted empire it used
to be, and how deep the fall is compared to the ascendancy! Soon we're
stranded in the shoals of not knowing what brought it about and how to fix
it; the book is an extended meditation on how when something goes wrong not
all the experts can put it together. Again and again the Muslims suffer
defeat, and this permanently scars them, leaves traces of humiliation that
make the whole process of adaptation in later centuries nearly impossible:

The impotence of the Islamic world confronted with Europe was brought home
in dramatic form in 1798, when a French expeditionary force commanded by a
young general called Napoleon Bonaparte invaded, occupied, and governed
Egypt. The lesson was harsh and clear--even a small European force could
invade one of the heartlands of the Islamic empire and do so with impunity.

Can any civilization recover from such trauma? What can be the cure for such
impotence?

For Lewis, Muslims have focused on acquiring the superficial trappings of
"wealth and power." This is explained by a persistent streak of incuriosity
about the Westerner: "Muslims in general had little desire or incentive to
venture into Christian Europe, and indeed the doctors of the Holy Law for
the most part prohibited such journeys, except for a specific and limited
purpose." When the Ottomans did "adopt the European practice of continuous
diplomacy through resident missions" they had a hard time doing so, because
unlike their European counterparts residing in Eastern lands they did not
have a tradition of language scholarship. We already know Lewis's next move.
He'll admit that Muslims did in fact make serious changes in this practice.
So we learn that the Turks "made a determined effort to learn new languages
and master new crafts" and did so "with astonishing speed and success," and
later threw themselves whole-heartedly into "sending students to study in
Western countries."

Not that this new openness did any good. Muslims don't have a word for
freedom in their language (we're told in the familiar disparagement of
Orientals), since their brains must be hard-wired to think in terms of
liberty and justice as the converse of tyranny, not freedom. Despite
superficial adaptations--constitutional government, nationalism, secularism,
socialism--nothing really disrupts the continuity of the unsolvable
questions. Lewis tells us that "words meaning 'free' and 'freedom,' in a
political sense, occur occasionally in eighteenth-century Middle-Eastern
writings, always in a European context." At first Muslims were "cautious and
conservative" in extracting European ideas of freedom for their own
condition, but--we're familiar by now with Lewis's backtracking--soon young
Muslims were attracted to "more radical interpretations of freedom." The
Young Turks were remarkable even for the usage of "young," a most European
trait.

The Ottomans form constitutional government in the late eighteenth century,
but the experiment fails. The Egyptians form constitutional government in
the same period with the same results, followed by Persia and Turkey in the
early twentieth century, but Lewis never tell us why. Simply, "Both [Persian
and Turkish constitutional revolutions] began with hope and enthusiasm. Both
ended, after brief intervals, in even more despotic regimes, ruling even
more impoverished and enfeebled countries." Meanwhile, the European imperial
project was doomed from the start because in order to maintain their empire
they had to train the new subjects in their languages--English, French, and
Dutch--which meant that new and dangerous ideas about freedom and
representation would infect the subject peoples as well. Subsequently, the
independence movements were led by Westernized intellectuals, although by
now the hopes associated with independence have vanished.

So here are some additional confusions: Muslims did enthusiastically, after
early reluctance, learn European languages, which led to decolonization, but
ultimately the learning of languages, and along with them Western ideas of
freedom, did no good, leading to new forms of tyranny. Why? Lewis has
nothing to say about that. About socialism, Lewis says, "various types of
socialisms, sometimes called Arab socialism, sometimes called scientific
socialism, were adopted. They ended in disastrous failure, in ruination
maintained by tyranny." Lewis does offer a sort of explanation: "The
difference between Middle Eastern and Western economic approaches can be
seen even in their distinctive forms of corruption, from which neither
society is exempt. In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it
to buy or influence power. In the East, one seizes power, and uses it to
make money." Tell that to the Ken Lays and Bernie Ebbers of America, who
influence (buy? seize?) the political process to make money. What this
Orientalist reduction does is avoid responsibility for rational analysis of
what went wrong. We're moving closer and closer to mysticism, essentialist
racial difference, phenomena irreducible to social facts. Lewis is not one
to give up after having come so far along this trail, however. "The mystery
of Western success was still not solved"--one wonders, for Lewis himself, or
for the Muslims he is supposedly writing about? "Could there be something
more than modernizing the armed forces, the state that commanded them, and
the economy that fed, supplied, and equipped them? In a word, something more
than modernity?" Ah, what could that something other be?

Since there is something more fundamental than military, economic, and
political power, it's best for Muslims not to focus on the visible aspects
of power. Lewis extracts from reports of Ottoman visitors to Europe, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to focus on three civilizational
differences: "women, science, and music." Lewis relates the astonishment of
Ottoman travelers (weren't we told that Muslims don't like to travel and
aren't curious?) Evliya Celebi and Valid Efendi at the courtesies granted
women in Europe. Since the Muslim world has been in permanent suspension
once the West's better mores superseded it, "the outcome of that struggle
[over women's rights] is still far from clear." Lewis says that for
fundamentalists like Khomeini women's emancipation is "a deadly blow to the
very heart of Islamic society," but that "the battle continues." They'll go
on figuring out for ever what should be obvious. Immediately though, he
starts talking about Namik Kemal, Qasim Amin, Kemal Ataturk and other
reformers who made women's emancipation a central project. Lewis offers no
analysis of the nature of reforms that have actually occurred in the last
century and a half, where they fell short and why. But he does accord a
great deal of influence to the adoption of Western dress among Muslim men,
particularly the Turkish military, as an outward acknowledgment of--we're
not quite told what--Western superiority?

Lewis grants that the status of slaves, women, and unbelievers was better in
the Muslim world than in medieval Europe, all three categories of people
having certain legal rights which Europe didn't grant until much later. As
early as the first half of the eighteenth century, legal reforms were
enacted by the Ottomans to remove the remaining differences among different
religions, by abolishing the jizya (poll-tax) and the ban on non-Muslims
bearing arms. We learn of some resistance by the ulema to these radical
reforms, but the fact that the Ottoman rulers felt confident enough to
embark on a program of radical egalitarianism indicates that the ulema were
marginalized. Indeed, Lewis quotes a contemporary American observer noting
with astonishment the strong role of women in the constitutional revolution
of 1906-1911 in Iran, and the lack of resistance by the ulema. Then what
went wrong after that? Noting that there is no equivalent to Christian
priesthood in Islam, Lewis fails to develop the reasons why secularism and
civil society have not made deeper inroads in Islamic society. Lewis
probably fails to do this because as an Orientalist his eyes are firmly set
on the past, not on the present or future.

As for science, Lewis quotes Ottoman officials of the early eighteenth
century approving the widespread literacy and practical application of
science in Europe, and notes the influence of materialism and positivism on
Turkish thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. But there is
no analysis of the failure. He simply says, "And yet, despite all these
efforts, and despite the foundation of schools and faculties of sciences in
almost all the new universities, the incorporation of modern science--or
should one say Western science?--was lamentably slow." No word why. Lewis
must maintain the veneer of compassionate, genteel Westerner dispassionately
observing a society held back, permanently paralyzed; and so he must
acknowledge past greatness (he places the glories all in the past, making
nostalgia a form of patronization): Muslims were great at preserving and
transmitting ancient science, and they even developed experimental science.
"And then, approximately from the end of the Middle Ages, there was a
dramatic change." In the Muslim world, "independent inquiry" came to an end,
while it took off in Western Europe.

By now Lewis is scraping the bottom of the barrel for explanations, having
rejected investigating any of the obvious ones. In Kipling's Kim, the
narrator observes, "All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals."
And this is what Lewis's final analysis boils down to. Muslims have never
had an accurate measurement of time and space. Of course, here too Lewis
will first indict universally, then acknowledge serious and systematic
efforts to achieve precision in time and space measurement, but conclude
that it doesn't matter anyway. He quotes the "English Arabist Edward William
Lane" remarking about his travels in Egypt between 1833 and 1835 that "of
the measures and weights used in Egypt . . .[he was] not able to give an
exact account." Then the retraction: "[Medieval Muslims] added new knowledge
achieved by their own experiments and researches, notably in cartography,
geography, geometry, and astronomy. The last-named in particular involved
delicate and precise calculations of both time and space."

Why these high-level scientific investigations failed to penetrate popular
culture--if that is even the question to ask--is not explained. So how about
some folkloric evidence from the lowest strata of contemporary Muslim
society instead? Lewis says that peasants today will tell you that the
distance between two villages is "one cigarette," meaning that it will take
as long as the time it takes to finish a cigarette. Lewis implies that the
use of clocks and watches is still a bit of a curiosity in the Middle East,
and people are barely getting used to them. How does this square with his
statement that "From early times, Muslim scholars and scientists devoted
considerable efforts to determining and tabulating the correct times and
direction of prayer. At one level, this was done by simple observation; at
another by the devising of instruments and the preparation of tables"; and
also that "[b]y the sixteenth century, European clocks and watches were
widely used in the Middle East."

So which is it? Creators of observatories were writing treatises on clocks,
there were guilds of clockmakers and watchmakers, and by the eighteenth
century, clocks and watches were commonly in private possession. The only
flaw Lewis can find is that there weren't public clocks, but even this was
addressed in the nineteenth century. Reading glasses and telescopes were
also quickly appreciated by Muslims. Lewis's Orientalist generalization
doesn't match with his own historical evidence. We're told that "as well as
time, Western influence also affected the measurement, perception, and use
of space." In a treatise devoted to explaining "what went wrong" we've now
devolved to a bland statement of Western influence on Islamic adaptation,

Lewis now seems to abandon the idea that there may be some fatal flaw of
mentality disallowing Muslims to accurately perceive time and space. So he
goes on that "Western perceptions -and measurement--of time and space also
had an impact on art and music." Western influence is clear in art and
architecture. The one irreducible thing the Muslims can't seem to get,
however, is "polyphony, by harmony or counterpoint," which is the essence of
team sports, parliamentary politics, and distinctive literary forms like the
novel and theater: "all these involve some degree of harmonization." It
turns out that the real absence is "polyphony, in whatever form, [which]
requires exact synchronization." Although the Islamic texts seem to be
obsessed by the passage of time, it is a different sort of conception--it is
really the "duration of time" that preoccupies Muslims. Philosophical
discussions "on the nature of time . . .are of little relevance at the
present day." The "clock and the timetable, the calendar and the program"
are of the very essence of modernity. Lewis says that by now these have been
thoroughly integrated in the Middle East, but still there is some doubt
about the "making and keeping of appointments." So finally we have the
explanation for the ills of the Muslim world: They can't show up on time! Do
we now see why the Muslim world is in such trouble? It's because they
believe:

Why hurry? Why do injury to the sweetness of living? Here, everybody is
late. The only thing is to join them. He who arrives at the appointed hour
risks wasting his time, and that, after all, is not funny. Therefore, not
too much precision. Strict exactitude has minor advantages, but is very
inconvenient. It lacks suppleness, it lacks fantasy, it lacks cheerfulness,
even dignity.

Lewis is not done yet. Muslims never bothered to translate ancient
literature, only works of science, history, and philosophy. "Medieval Islam
was an intensely historical-minded society, and produced a vast, rich, and
varied historical literature." The problem is that they weren't as
interested in Western history as Lewis would like them to have been. He did
say that theater requires polyphony, strict harmonization--we thought the
Muslims didn't have that--yet he goes on to describe widespread commitment
to theater. The same for printing--Muslims quickly adopted this innovation.
Muslims translated books like Robinson Crusoe, but this one can be explained
away by its similarity to a previous Arabic model. "Sport was not unknown of
course," but perhaps due to lack of the polyphonous instinct, team sports
were rare:

It was the English who invented football and its analogue--parliamentary
politics. There are remarkable resemblances between the two and both
obviously come from the same national genius. The adoption of competitive
team games has so far been more successful in the Middle East than the
adoption of parliamentary government.

Lewis says that "dining--as distinct from merely eating--is another Western
'cultural' influence." For anyone who knows anything about Islamic culture,
this is a laughable assertion. The only reason to say this seems to be to
imply that Muslims are barbaric to the extent that they only know how to eat
and not dine. Western verbal culture has been thoroughly assimilated by now,
although Lewis wonders how that could have been since it is the hardest
thing to assimilate. The alleged rejection of Western music--it "falls on
deaf ears" in the Middle East--perhaps exercises Lewis more than any single
aberration. But this is a demonstrably false proposition. They do care about
"pop music and rock music" but "it is too early to say what this may
portend." Perhaps after recolonization of the Middle Eastern oil fields
there may be time enough to know what this portends. In short, they can try
to copy the forms, but they can never get the content as we who relish
football and parliamentary politics as if they were natural to us can. It is
an inherent sickness, whatever it is.

So let's drop this pretense of investigating the causes of civilizational
decline altogether, and focus on how upset and enraged and emotionally
unbalanced they feel because the West has invaded "the Muslim in every
aspect of his public and--more painfully--even his private life." All this
would be funny, if it weren't so dangerous. Muslims are in a state of
infantile humiliation: "The twentieth century, particularly the second half,
brought [brought how? through divine agency? through Western imperialism?]
further humiliations--the awareness that they were no longer even the first
among the followers, but were falling ever further back in the lengthening
line of eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia." Quite
aside from the fact that part of the consciousness of the East Asian project
has been to modernize but not Westernize to the extent possible, Lewis wants
to insinuate how Muslims are no longer in any frame of mind solid enough to
investigate the true causes of their decline. Their humiliation leads to
rage. Rage leads to such abominations as terrorism. And that requires the
West to overtly step in again, recolonize--Lewis indeed ends on this precise
note.

This is the template according to which Americans are being prepared for a
final onslaught against those foolish enough to think that there could be an
alternative to the American model. All previous Muslim attempts to modernize
have only increased the power of the state to tyrannize; the conclusion is
that we should take away their power and leave them pauperized.

Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist.

Here's another:

Scholarship or Sophistry?
Bernard Lewis and the New Orientalism

By M. SHAHID ALAM

It would appear from the fulsome praise heaped by mainstream reviewers on
Bernard Lewis's most recent and well-timed book, What Went Wrong? Western
Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002), that the
demand for Orientalism has reached a new peak. America's search for new
enemies that began soon after the end of the Cold War very quickly
resurrected the ghost of an old, though now decrepit, enemy, Islam. Slowly
but surely, this revived the sagging fort1unes of Orientalism, so that it
speaks again with the treble voice of authority.

The mainstream reviewers describe Bernard Lewis as "the doyen of Middle
Eastern studies," the "father" of Islamic studies, "[a]rguably the West's
most distinguished scholar on the Middle East," and "[a] Sage for the Age."
It would appear that Lewis is still the reigning monarch of Orientalism, as
he was some twenty-five years back when Edward Said, in his Orientalism,
dissected and exposed the intentions, modalities, deceptions, and
imperialist connections of this ideological enterprise. This Orientalist
tiger has not changed his stripes over the fifty-odd years that he has been
honing his skills. Now at the end of his long career-only coincidentally,
also the peak-he presents the summation, the quintessence of his scholarship
and wisdom on Islam and the Middle East, gathered, compressed in the pages
of this slim book that sets out to explain what went wrong with Islamic
history, and that has so mesmerized reviewers on the right.

Who Is Bernard Lewis?

We will return to the book in a moment, but before that, we need to step
back some twenty-five years and examine how Edward Said, in Orientalism, has
described this Orientalist tiger's stripes and his cunning ploys at
concealment. Edward Said gets to the nub of Lewis's Orientalist project when
he writes that his "work purports to be liberal objective scholarship but is
in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material."
Lewis's work is "aggressively ideological." He has dedicated his entire
career, spanning more than five decades, to a "project to debunk, to whittle
down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam." Said writes:

The core of Lewis's ideology about Islam is that it never changes, and his
whole mission is to inform conservative segments of the Jewish reading
public, and anyone else who cares to listen, that any political, historical,
and scholarly account of Muslims must begin and end with the fact that
Muslims are Muslims.

Although Lewis's objectives are ominous, his methods are quite subtle; he
prefers to work "by suggestion and insinuation." In order to disarm his
readers and win their trust and admiration, he delivers frequent "sermons on
the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian." This
is only a cover, a camouflage, for his political propaganda. Once he is
seated on his high Orientalist perch, he goes about cleverly insinuating how
Islam is deficient in and opposed to universal values, which, of course,
always originate in the West. It is because of this deficiency in values
that Arabs have trouble accepting a democratic Israel-it is always
"democratic" Israel. Lewis can write "objectively" about the Arab's
"ingrained" opposition to Israel without ever telling his readers that
Israel is an imperialist creation, and an expansionist, colonial-settler
state that was founded on terror, wars, and ethnic cleansing. Lewis's work
on Islam represents the "culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only
degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."

Lewis's scholarly mask slips off rather abruptly when he appears on
television, a feat that he accomplishes with predictable regularity. Once he
is on the air, his polemical self, the Orientalist crouching tiger, takes
over, all his sermons about objectivity forgotten, and then he does not
shrink from displaying his sneering contempt for the Arabs and Muslims more
generally, his blind partisanship for Israel, or his bristling hostility
toward Iran. One recent example will suffice here. In a PBS interview
broadcast on 16 April 2002, hosted by Charlie Rose, he offered this gem:
"Asking Arafat to give up terrorism would be like asking Tiger to give up
golf." That is a statement whose malicious intent and vindictive meanness
might have been excusable if it came from an official Israeli spokesman.

After this background check, do we really want to hear from this "sage"
about "what went wrong" with Islamic societies; why, after nearly a thousand
years of expansive power and world leadership in many branches of the arts
and sciences, they began to lose their élan, their military advantage, and
their creativity and, starting in the nineteenth century, capitulated to
their historical adversary, the West? And, though Islamic societies have
regained their political independence, why has their economic and cultural
decline proved so difficult to reverse? Yet, although our stomachs turn at
the prospect, we must sample the gruel Lewis offers, taste it, and analyze
it, if only to identify the toxins that it contains and that have poisoned
far too many Western minds for more than fifty years.

Where is the Context?

What went wrong with the Islamic societies? When this question is asked by
our "doyen of Middle Eastern studies," especially when it is asked right
after the attacks of 11 September, it is hard not to notice that this manner
of framing the problem of the eclipse of Islamic societies by the West is
loaded with biases, value judgments, and preconceptions, and even contains
its own answer. There are two sets of "wrongs" in What Went Wrong? The first
consists of "wrongs," deviations from what is just and good, that we
confront in contemporary Islamic societies. Lewis undoubtedly has in mind a
whole slew of problems, including the political, economic, and cultural
failings of the Islamic world. In addition, this question seeks to discover
deeper "wrongs," deviations from what is just and good that are prior to and
at the root of the present "wrongs." Lewis is concerned primarily with this
second set of "wrongs."

The first problem one encounters in Lewis's narrative of Middle Eastern
decline is the absence of any context. He seeks to create the impression
that the failure of Islam to catch up with the accelerating pace of changes
in Western Europe is a problem specific to this region; there is no attempt
to locate this problem in a global context. This exclusive Middle Eastern
focus reveals to all but the blinkered the mala fides of What Went Wrong?
Lewis cannot hide behind pious claims that a historian's "loyalties may well
influence his choice of subject of research; they should not influence his
treatment of it." His exclusive focus on the decline of the Middle East is
not legitimate precisely because it is designed to-and it unavoidably
must-"influence his treatment of it."

Once Western Europe began to make the transition from a feudal-agrarian to a
capitalist-industrial society, starting in the sixteenth century, the
millennial balance of power among the world's major civilizations shifted
inexorably in favor of Western Europe. A society that was shifting to a
capitalist-industrial base, capable of cumulative growth, commanded greater
social power than slow-growing societies still operating on feudal-agrarian
foundations. Under the circumstances, it was unlikely that non-Western
societies could simultaneously alter the foundations of their societies
while also fending off attacks from Western states whose social power was
expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Even as these feudal-agrarian
societies sought to reorganize their economies and institutions, Western
onslaughts against them deepened, and this made their reorganization
increasingly difficult. It is scarcely surprising that the growing asymmetry
between the two sides eventually led to the eclipse, decline, or subjugation
of nearly all non-Western societies.

While Lewis studiously avoids any reference to this disequalizing dynamic,
another Western historian of Islam not driven by a compulsion "to debunk, to
whittle down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam" understood this tendency
quite well. I am referring here to Marshall Hodgson, whose The Venture of
Islam shows a deep and, for its time, rare understanding of the
interconnectedness, across space and time, amongst all societies in the
Eastern hemisphere. He understood very clearly that the epochal changes
under way in parts of Western Europe between 1600 and 1800 were creating an
altogether new order based on markets, capital accumulation, and
technological changes, which acted upon each other to produce cumulative
growth. Moreover, this endowed the most powerful Western states with a
degree of social power that no one could resist. In his Venture of Islam,
Marshall Hodgson writes,

Hence, the Western Transmutation, once it got well under way, could neither
be paralleled independently nor be borrowed wholesale. Yet it could not, in
most cases, be escaped. The millennial parity of social power broke down,
with results that were disastrous everywhere.

Clearly, Lewis's presentation of his narrative of Middle Eastern decline
without any context is a ploy. His objective is to whittle down world
history, to reduce it to a primordial contest between two historical
adversaries, the West and Islam. This is historiography in the crusading
mode, one that purports to resume the Crusades-interrupted in the thirteenth
century-and carry them to their unfinished conclusion, the triumph of the
West or, conversely, the humiliation and defeat of Middle Eastern Islam.
Once this framework has been established, with its exclusive focus on a
failing Islamic civilization, it is quite easy to cast the narrative of this
decay as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, which must then be explained in
terms of specifically Islamic failures. Thus Lewis's agenda in What Went
Wrong? is to discover all that was and is "wrong" with Islamic societies and
to explain their decline and present troubles in terms of these "wrongs."

If Lewis had an interest in exploring the decline of the Middle East, he
would be asking why the new, more dynamic historical system that lay behind
the rise of the West had not emerged in the Middle East, India, China,
Italy, or Africa. If he had asked this question, it may have directed him to
the source and origins of Western hegemony. But Lewis ducks this issue
altogether. Instead, he takes the growing power of the West-its advances in
science and technology-as the starting point of his narrative and
concentrates on demonstrating why the efforts of Islamic societies to catch
up with the West were both too little and too late. In other words, he seeks
to explain a generic phenomenon-the overthrow of agrarian societies before
the rise of a new historical system, based on capital, markets, and
technological change-as one that is specific to Islam and is due to
specifically Islamic "wrongs."

If one focuses only on the Middle Eastern response to the Western challenge,
it does appear to be too little and too late. The Ottoman Empire, once the
most powerful in the Islamic world, had lost nearly all its European
territories by the end of the nineteenth century, and the remnants of its
Arab territories were lost after its defeat in the First World War. At this
point, the Ottoman Empire had been reduced to a rump state in northern
Anatolia, with the British and French occupying Istanbul, the Greeks pushing
to occupy central Anatolia, the Armenians extending their boundaries in
eastern Anatolia, and the French pushing north in Silesia. Yet, after
defeating the Greeks, the French, and the Armenians, the victorious Turks
managed to establish in 1922 a new and modern Turkish nation-state over
Istanbul, Thrace, and all of Anatolia. The Iranians were more successful in
preserving their territories, though, like the Ottomans, they too had lost
control over their economic policies in the first decades of the nineteenth
century. However, if one compares these outcomes with the fate suffered by
other regions-barring Japan, China, and Thailand, nearly all of Asia and
Africa was directly colonized by the Europeans-one has to conclude that the
results for the Middle East could have been worse.

Uncurious Ottomans

There is even less substance to Lewis's claims about Middle Eastern inertia
in the face of Western threats, especially when we compare their responses
to these threats with the record of East Asian societies.

First, consider Lewis's charge that the Muslims showed little curiosity
about the West. He attributes this failing to Muslim bigotry that frowned
upon contacts with the infidels. This is a curious charge against "a world
civilization" that Lewis admits was "polyethnic, multiracial, international,
one might even say intercontinental." It also seems strange that the
Ottomans, and other Middle Eastern states before them, were quite happy to
employ their Christian and Jewish subjects-as high officials, diplomats,
physicians, and bankers-traded with the Europeans themselves, bought arms
and borrowed money from them, and yet, somehow, loathed learning anything
from the same infidels. In addition, Muslim philosophers, historians and
travelers have left several very valuable accounts of non-Islamic societies.
One of these, Al-Biruni's monumental study of India, still remains without a
rival for its encyclopedic coverage, objectivity, and sympathy for its
subject. Clearly, Lewis has fallen prey to the Orientalist temptation: when
something demands a carefully researched explanation, an understanding of
material and social conditions, better pin it on some cultural propensity.

Lewis is little aware how his book is littered with contradictions. If the
Muslims were not a little curious about developments in the West, it is odd
that the oldest map of the Americas-which dates from 1513 and is the most
accurate map from the sixteenth century-was prepared by Piri Reis, a Turkish
admiral and cartographer. It would also appear that the number of Muslims
who had left accounts of their observations on Europe were not such a rarity
either. Lewis himself mentions no fewer than ten names, nearly all of them
Ottomans, spanning the period from 1665 to 1840; and this is far an from
exhaustive list. One of them, Ratib Effendi, who was in Vienna from 1791 to
1792, left a report that "ran to 245 manuscript folios, ten times or more
than ten times those of his predecessors, and it goes into immense detail,
primarily on military matters, but also, to quite a considerable extent, on
civil affairs." Diplomatic contacts provide another indicator of the early
growth of Ottoman interest and involvement in the affairs of European
states. Between 1703 and 1774, the Ottomans signed sixty-eight treaties or
agreements with sovereign, mostly European states. Since each treaty must
have involved at least one diplomatic exchange, the Ottomans could hardly be
accused of neglecting diplomatic contacts with Europe.

According to Lewis, the Ottoman decision not to challenge the Portuguese
hegemony in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century was a failure of
vision. Despite some early warnings from elder statesmen, the Ottomans did
not anticipate that the Portuguese incursion would translate some 250 years
later into a broader and more serious European challenge to their power. As
a result, they chose to concentrate their war efforts on acquiring territory
in Europe, which, Lewis claims, they saw as "the principal battleground
between Islam and Europe, the rival faiths competing for enlightenment-and
mastery-of the world." It is of no interest to Lewis that the Ottomans,
departing from their own tradition of land warfare, had built a powerful
navy starting in the fifteenth century and created a seaborne empire in the
eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Red Sea. If the Ottomans chose
to concentrate their resources on land wars in Central Europe rather than
challenge Portuguese hegemony in the Indian Ocean, this was not the result
of religious zealotry. It reflected the balance of class interests in the
Ottoman political structure. In an empire that had traditionally been
land-based, the interests of the landowning classes prevailed against
commercial interests that looked to the Indian Ocean for their livelihood.
Although the decision not to contest the Portuguese presence in the Indian
Ocean in the sixteenth century was fateful, that policy was rational for the
Ottomans.

A Military Decline?

Several Orientalists-Lewis amongst them-have argued that the military
decline of the Ottoman Empire became irreversible after its second failed
siege of Vienna in 1683, or perhaps earlier, after its naval defeat at
Lepanto in 1571. In an earlier work, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Lewis
declared that "[t]he Ottomans found it more and more difficult to keep up
with the rapidly advancing Western technological innovations, and in the
course of the eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire, itself far ahead of the
Islamic world, fell decisively behind Europe in virtually all arts of war."

This thesis of an early and inexorable decline has now been convincingly
questioned. Jonathan Grant has shown that the Ottomans occupied the third
tier in the hierarchy of military technology, behind innovators and
exporters, at the beginning of the fifteenth century; they could reproduce
the latest military technology with the help of foreign expertise but they
never graduated into export or introduced any significant innovations. The
Ottomans succeeded in maintaining this relative position, through two waves
of technology diffusion, until the early nineteenth century. However, they
failed to keep up with the third wave of technology diffusion, based upon
the technology of the industrial revolution, that began in the
mid-nineteenth century. The Ottomans fell below their third-tier status only
toward the end of the nineteenth century, when they became totally dependent
on imported weaponry.

If we put together the evidence made available by Lewis, it becomes clear
that the Ottomans were not slow in recognizing the institutional superiority
enjoyed by Europe's military. A debate about the causes of Ottoman weakness
began after the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, growing more intense over time.
A document from the early seventeenth century recognized that "it was no
longer sufficient, as in the past, to adopt Western weapons. It was also
necessary to adopt Western training, structures, and tactics for their
effective use." The Ottomans began to dispatch special envoys to European
capitals "with instructions to observe and to learn and, more particularly,
to report on anything that might be useful to the Muslim state in coping
with its difficulties and confronting its enemies." Several of these envoys
wrote reports, occasionally quite extensive and detailed, on their European
visits, and these reports had an important impact on thinking in Ottoman
circles. The first mathematical school for the military was founded in 1734,
and a second one followed in the 1770s.

While Ottoman military technology generally kept pace with the advances in
Europe, at least into the first decades of the nineteenth century, it took
the Ottomans longer to introduce organizational changes in the military
since they ran into powerful social obstacles. As a result, the first
serious attempts at modernizing the army did not begin until the late
eighteenth century, during the reign of Selim III, who sought to bypass the
problems of reforming the existing military corps by recruiting and training
a new European-style army. Although, by 1806, he had raised a modern army of
nearly twenty-five thousand, he had to abandon his efforts in the face of
resistance from the ulama and a Janissary rebellion. The task of modernizing
the Ottoman army was taken up again in 1826 after the Janissary corps was
disbanded, and in two years, the new Ottoman army included seventy-five
thousand regular troops. Simultaneously, the Ottomans introduced reforms in
the bureaucracy and also reformed land-tenure policies with the objective of
raising revenues.

And yet these efforts at modernizing the Ottoman military-quite early by
most standards-failed to avert the progressive fragmentation and eventual
demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. One might join
Hodgson in thinking that this was inevitable, that agrarian societies in
Asia and Africa could not modernize fast enough in the face of the ever
increasing economic and military power of the modern Western nation-states.
But, perhaps, this assessment is too fatalistic; and it is contradicted by
the case of-among others-Russia, which was spared colonization or subjection
to open-door treaties. A comparison of the two quickly reveals that the
Ottomans' efforts at modernization were undermined by several extraneous
factors. The Ottoman Empire, which straddled three continents, lacked the
compactness that might have made its territories more defensible. What
proved more fatal to the Ottoman Empire was the fact that the Ottoman Turks,
though they constituted its ethnic core, made up less than a third of its
population and occupied an even smaller part of its territories. Once
nationalism reared its head in the nineteenth century, the fragmentation of
the Ottoman Empire was well-nigh unavoidable. The Ottomans faced one
insurrection after another in the Balkans, each backed by some European
power, until the last of these territories had broken free in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Not only did these insurrections reduce
the revenues of the empire, but by diverting its attention and resources to
war, they delayed the modernization of the military and economy. Eventually,
during World War I, the Arab territories of the empire were wrested away by
the British and French, with support from Arab nationalists.

The Egyptian program to modernize its military, started in 1815 under the
leadership of Muhammad Ali, was more ambitious and more successful. It was
part of an integrated program of modernization and industrial development
financed through state ownership of lands, development of new export crops,
and state-owned monopolies over the marketing of the major agricultural
products. In 1831, Egypt's Europeanized army consisted of one hundred
thousand officers and men, and in 1833, having conquered Syria, it was
penetrating deep into Anatolia when its march was halted by Russian naval
intervention. When the Ottomans resumed the Syrian war in 1839, the
Egyptians routed the Ottoman forces and were rapidly marching westward,
poised to capture Istanbul for Muhammad Ali. At this point, all the great
European powers, except France, intervened, forcing the Egyptians to
withdraw, give up their acquisitions in Syria and Arabia, reduce their
military force to eighteen thousand, and enforce the Anglo-Ottoman
Commercial Convention, which required the lowering of tariffs to 3 percent
and the dismantling of all state monopolies. By depriving Egypt of its
revenues and dramatically reducing the military's demand for its
manufactures, these measures abruptly terminated the career of the earliest
and most ambitious program to build a modern, industrial society in the
Periphery.

Lewis faults the Ottomans and Egyptians of the nineteenth century for
seeking to build an effective military response on the foundations of a
modern industrial economy. He thinks it odd that these countries "tried to
catch up with Europe by building factories, principally to equip and clothe
their armies." Apparently, Lewis is unaware that the Ottomans-and especially
Egypt-were breaking new ground in their efforts to modernize their
manufactures, a road that would soon be taken by most European countries.
Nearly every country that lagged behind in the nineteenth century and was
forced to catch up with Britain, built its strategy around
industrialization, and the military in many of these countries formed an
important initial market for their nascent industries. Of course, Lewis had
no choice but to demean the military and industrial responses to the Western
threat. As we will see, he believes that the Ottomans should have been
working harder to remedy their cultural deficiencies, such as their
less-than-enthusiastic appreciation for European harmonies.

Industrial Failure-But Why?

Lewis declares that the industrialization programs launched by the Ottomans
and Egypt "failed, and most of the early factories became derelict." These
programs were doomed from the outset because their promoters lacked a proper
regard for time, measurement, harmonies, secularism, and women's
rights-values upon which Western industrial success was founded.

We must correct these jaundiced observations. Far from being a failure, the
Egyptian "program of industrialization and military expansion," according to
Immanuel Wallerstein (Unthinking Social Science), "seriously undermined the
Ottoman Empire and almost established a powerful state in the Middle East
capable eventually of playing a major role in the interstate system."
Muhammad Ali's fiscal and economic reforms, between 1805 and 1847, brought
about a more than ninefold increase in government revenues. At their height
in the 1830s, Egypt's state monopolies had made investments worth $12
million and employed thirty thousand workers in a broad range of industries
that included foundries, textiles, paper, chemicals, shipyards, glassware,
and arsenals. By the early 1830s, Egyptian arsenals and naval yards had
acquired the ability to "produce appreciable amounts of warships, guns and
munitions," elevating Egypt "to a major regional power." Naturally, these
developments in Egypt were raising concerns in British government circles. A
report submitted to the British foreign office in 1837 sounded the right
note: "A manufacturing country Egypt never can become-or at least for ages."
Three years later, when Istanbul was within the grasp of Muhammad Ali's
forces, a coalition of European powers intervened to roll back his gains,
downsize his military, and dismantle his state monopolies. These measures
successfully reversed the Periphery's first industrial revolution.

The Ottomans launched an ambitious program of industrialization in the early
1840s, but it had little chance of success and was abandoned within a few
years of its inauguration. Since the early nineteenth century, the unequal
treaties limited the Ottomans to import tariffs under 3 percent, severely
limiting their ability to protect their manufactures or raise revenues for
investments in development projects. In 1838, the Anglo-Turkish Commercial
Convention forced them to dismantle all state monopolies, dealing another
blow to their fiscal autonomy. It speaks to the determination of the
Ottomans that they sought to launch an industrial revolution despite their
adverse fiscal circumstances. In the decade starting in 1841, the Ottomans
had set up, to the west of Istanbul, a complex of state-owned industries
that included spinning and weaving mills, a foundry, steam-operated machine
works, and a boatyard for the construction of small steamships. In the words
of Edward Clark (International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 1974): "In
variety as well as in number, in planning, in investment, and in attention
given to internal sources of raw materials these manufacturing enterprises
far surpassed the scope of all previous efforts and mark this period as
unique in Ottoman history." Several foreign observers saw in the Istanbul
industrial complex the potential to evolve into "a Turkish Manchester and
Leeds, a Turkish Birmingham and Sheffield," all wrapped in one. In addition,
other modern industrial, mining, and agricultural projects were initiated
during the same period in several other parts of the Ottoman Empire. But
these grand projects could not be sustained for long. Once the Crimean War
started, the Ottomans were forced to borrow heavily from foreign banks, and,
strapped for funds, they abandoned most of these industrial projects. Thus
ended another bold experiment in industrialization, early even by European
standards, but whose failure was linked to the loss of Ottoman fiscal
sovereignty.

It's in Their Culture

The real culprit behind the political, economic, and military failures of
the Middle East over the past half a millennium was their culture. Lewis
identifies a whole slew of problematic cultural traits, but two are singled
out for special attention: the mixing of religion and politics and the
unequal treatment of women, unbelievers, and slaves. Both, according to
Lewis, are Islamic flaws.

Lewis argues that secularism constitutes a great divide between Islam and
the West: the West always had it and Islamic societies never did.
Secularism, as the separation of church and state, "is, in a profound sense,
Christian." Its origins go back to Jesus-his injunction to give God and
Caesar, each, their due-and to the early history of the Christians when, as
a minority persecuted by the Roman state, they developed the institutions of
the Church with its "own laws and courts, its own hierarchy and chain of
authority." This was quite unique, setting Europe apart from anything that
went before and from its competitors. In particular, the Muslims never
created an "institution corresponding to, or even remotely resembling, the
Church in Christendom."

These claims about a secular Christendom-an oxymoron in itself-and a
theocratic Islam are problematic. Lewis rests his case upon two
propositions. First, he contrasts the presence of the Church in Christendom
against its absence in Islamic societies. Second, he works on the
presumption that the existence of a Church, a hierarchical religious
organization different from the state, necessarily implies a separation
between religion and political authority. For the most part, these claims
are contestable.

The existence of a Church in Christendom is not in dispute, but the
contention that there existed nothing like it in Islamic societies is
contradicted by history. The Prophet and the first four Caliphs combined
religious and mundane authority in their persons. In addition, most Islamic
thinkers have maintained that the ideal Islamic state, modeled after the
state in Medina, must be guided by the Qur'an and the Prophet's Sunnah. The
Islamic practice in the centuries following the pious Caliphs, however,
departed quite sharply from the canonical model as well as the theory.

In one of his numerous attempts at distortion, Lewis asserts that the
"pietists" retreated into "radical opposition or quietist withdrawal" when
they failed to impose "ecclesiastical constraints on political and military
authority." This is only part of the picture. In the bigger picture, we find
that the pietists turned vigorously to scholarship. Starting from a scratch,
and independently of state authority and without state funding, the early
pietists developed the Islamic sciences, which included the Traditions of
the Prophet, biographies of the Prophet and his companions, Arabic grammar,
and theology. Most significantly, these pious scholars elaborated several
competing systems of Islamic laws-regulating every aspect of individual,
social, and business life-on the premise that legislative authority was
vested in the consensus of the pious scholars-or, in the case of Shi'ites,
in the rulings of the imams. The state had executive powers but it possessed
no legislative authority. In effect, Islam had evolved not only separate
political and religious institutions, but separate executive and legislative
powers as well. It was the pious scholars-with their competing schools of
jurisprudence-who constituted the informal legislatures of Islam, long
before these institutions had evolved in Europe.

Lewis's second proposition-that separation between religion and political
authority flows from the presence of a Church-is equally dubious. There can
be no separation between religion and political authority if religion is
organized into a Church with power over the lives of people. If the Church
itself commands power, ipso facto, it becomes a rival of the state. It
follows that the Church can and will exercise its power directly to regulate
the religious, economic, and social affairs of the community, and indirectly
by using the state for its own ends. Once Christianity became the official
religion of the Roman state, the Church progressively increased its power:
it used the power of the state to eliminate or marginalize all competing
religions; it gained the exclusive right to define all religious dogma and
rituals; it acquired properties, privileges, and exclusive control over
education; it expanded its legislative control over different spheres of
society. In time, since the Church and state recruited their higher
personnel from the same classes, they also developed an identity of class
interests. In other words, although they remained organizationally distinct,
the Church and the state mixed religion and politics.

One expects that a separation of religion and political authority would
produce a measure of tolerance. Yet, the adoption of Christianity as its
official creed led the Roman state, hitherto tolerant of all religious
communities, to inaugurate a regime of growing intolerance toward other
religions, and even toward any dissent within Christianity. As Daniel
Schowalter (Oxford History of the Biblical World) says, "By the end of the
fourth century, both anti-pagan and anti-Jewish legislation would serve as
licenses for the increasing number of acts of vandalism and violent
destruction directed against pagan and Jewish places of worship carried out
by Christian mobs, often at the instigation of the local clergy." Although
the practice of Judaism was not banned, by the end of the fourth century
C.E., a variety of decrees prohibited conversion to Judaism, Jewish
ownership of non-Jewish slaves, and marriage between Jews and Christians,
and Jews were excluded from most imperial offices. In dogma, theology,
legislation, and practice, the Church and state crafted a regime that
suppressed paganism and marginalized all other non-Christian forms of
worship.

According to Lewis, modernization in Islamic societies was set back by a
second set of cultural barriers-namely, the inferior status of unbelievers,
slaves, and, especially, women. It is not that these groups labored under
stricter restraints than their counterparts in Europe, but that their
unequal status was "sacrosanct" in that they "were seen as part of the
structure of Islam, buttressed by revelation, by the precept and practice of
the Prophet, and by the classical and scriptural history of the Islamic
community." As a result, these three inequalities have endured; they were
not challenged even by the radical Islamic movements that arose from time to
time to protest social and economic inequalities.

Lewis's claims are problematic for several reasons. The first problem is
their lack of historicity. Implicitly, Lewis bases his case on a reading of
European history that inverts causation between economic development and
social equality. He would have us believe that Europeans developed because
their flexible legal systems moved faster to create a more egalitarian
society, a necessary basis for rapid progress. This shows a curious
indifference to chronology. While Europe was establishing its global
capitalist empire it was conducting the Inquisition, expelling the Moors and
Jews from Spain, waging unending religious wars, burning witches at the
stake, and granted few legal rights to women. In addition, they were
creating in the Americas economic systems based on slavery that would be
abolished only after the 1860s. In Russia, serfdom remained the basis of the
economy at least until the 1860s. The equality Lewis speaks of began to
arrive in slow increments at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it
was a byproduct of economic development, not its precursor.

Lewis's claims about inequalities in Muslim societies lack historicity on
another score. It is a bit surprising that "the doyen of Middle Eastern
studies," who has spent more than fifty years studying the history of the
region, is unaware of at least a few challenges to the alleged inferior
status of women or unbelievers. In the early centuries of Islam, there were
at least three groups-the Kharijis, the Qarmatians and the Sufis-that did
not accept the legal interpretations of the four traditional schools of
Islamic law as sacrosanct. Instead, they looked for inspiration to the
Qur'anic precepts on the moral and spiritual equality of men and women,
claiming that the early applications of these precepts were time-bound. The
Kharijis and Qarmatians rejected concubinage and child marriage, and the
Qarmatians went further in rejecting polygamy and the veil. In a similar
spirit, the Sufis welcomed women travelers on the spiritual path, permitting
women "to give a central place in their lives to their spiritual vocation."
In sixteenth-century India, the Mughal emperor Akbar abolished the jizyah
(the poll tax imposed by Islamic law on all non-Muslims), banned child
marriage, and repealed a law that forced Islam on prisoners of war.

The "most profound single difference" between Islam and the West, however,
concerns the status of women. In particular, Lewis argues that Islam permits
polygamy and concubinage and that the Christian Churches prohibit it. Once
again, Lewis is exaggerating the differences. In nearly all societies, not
excluding the Western, men of wealth and power have always had access to
multiple sexual partners, although within different legal frameworks. Islam
gave equal rights to all the free sexual partners of men as well as to their
children. The West, driven by a concern for primogeniture, adopted an
opposite solution by vesting all the rights in a man's primary sexual
partner and her offspring. All the other sexual partners-a man's
mistresses-and their children had no legal rights. Arguably, Europe's
mistresses might think that the Islamic practice favored women.

It would appear from Lewis's emphasis on polygamy and concubinage that they
were very common in Islamic societies. In fact, both were quite rare outside
the ruling class. Among others, this is attested by European visitors to
eighteenth-century Aleppo and nineteenth-century Cairo. A study of documents
relating to two thousands estates in seventeenth-century Turkey could
identify only twenty cases of polygamy. Keeping concubines was most likely
even rarer.

Lewis quotes from the reports of Muslim visitors who were startled to see
European men curtsying to women in public places; this is supposed to
validate the "striking contrasts" in women's status in Europe and Islam.
Once the bowing and curtsying are done, we need to compare the property
rights enjoyed by women in Europe and Islam, a quite reliable index of the
social power of women inside the household and outside. In this matter, too,
it is the Muslim women who had the advantage until quite recently. Unlike
her European counterpart, a married Muslim woman could own property, and she
enjoyed exclusive rights to income from her property as well as the wages
she earned. In Britain, the most advanced country in Europe, married women
did not acquire the right to own property until 1882.

The ownership of property gave Muslim women a measure of social power that
was not available to women in Europe. A Muslim woman of independent means
had a stronger hand in marriage: she could initiate a divorce or craft a
marriage contract that prevented her husband from taking another wife.
Muslim women often engaged in trading activities, buying and selling
property, lending money, or renting out stores. They created waqfs,
charitable foundations financed by earnings from property, which they also
administered. A small number of women distinguished themselves as scholars
of the religious sciences. According to one report from the early nineteenth
century, women attended al-Azhar, the leading university in the Islamic
world. Ahmed concludes, on the basis of such evidence, that Muslim "women
were not, after all, the passive creatures, wholly without material
resources or legal rights, that the Western world once imagined them to be."

What Went Wrong?

In an earlier era, before the Zionists developed a proprietary interest in
Palestine, the least bigoted voices in the field of Oriental studies were
often those of European Jews. Ironically, Lewis himself has written that
these pro-Islamic Jews "were among the first who attempted to present Islam
to European readers as Muslims themselves see it and to stress, to
recognize, and indeed sometimes to romanticize the merits and achievements
of Muslim civilization in its great days." At a time when most Orientalists
took Muhammad for a scheming imposter, equated Islam with fanaticism,
thought that the Qur'an was a crude and incoherent text, and believed that
the Arabs were incapable of abstract thought, a growing number of Jewish
scholars often took opposite positions. They accepted the sincerity of
Muhammad's mission, described Arabs as "Jews on horseback" and Islam as an
evolving faith that was more democratic than other religions, and debunked
Orientalist claims about a static Islam and a dynamic West. It would appear
that these Jews were anti-Orientalists long before Edward Said.

These contrarian positions had a variety of motives behind them. Even as the
Jews began to enter the European mainstream, starting in the nineteenth
century, they were still outsiders, having only recently emerged from the
confinement of ghettos, and it would be scarcely surprising if they were
seeking to maintain their distinctiveness by emphasizing and identifying
with the achievements of another Semitic people, the Arabs. In celebrating
Arab civilization, these Jewish scholars were perhaps sending a
non-too-subtle message to the Europeans that their civilization was not
unique, that Arab achievements often excelled theirs, and that Europeans
were building upon Islamic achievements in science and philosophy. In
addition, Jewish scholars' discussions of religious and racial tolerance in
Islamic societies, toward Jews in particular, may have offered hope that
such tolerance was attainable in Europe too. The discussions may also have
been an invitation to Europeans to incorporate religious and racial
tolerance in their standards of civilization.

Yet the vigor of this early anti-Orientalism of Jewish scholars would not
last; it would not survive the logic of the Zionist movement as it sought to
create a Jewish state in Palestine. Such a state could only emerge as a
child of Western imperialist powers, and it could only come into existence
by displacing the greater part of the Palestinian population, by
incorporating them into an apartheid state, or through some combination of
the two. In addition, once created, Israel could only survive as a military,
expansionist, and hegemonic state, constantly at war with its neighbors. In
other words, as the Zionist project gathered momentum it was inevitable that
the European Jews' attraction for Islam was not going to endure. In fact, it
would be replaced by a bitter contest, one in which the Jews, as junior
partners of the imperialist powers, would seek to deepen the Orientalist
project in the service of Western power. Bernard Lewis played a leading part
in this Jewish reorientation. In the words of Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis
"came to personify the post-war shift from a sympathetic to a critical
posture."

Ironically, this shift occurred when many Orientalists had begun to shed
their Christian prejudice against Islam, even making amends for the excesses
of their forebears. Another factor aiding this shift toward a less polemical
Orientalism was the entry of a growing number of Arabs, both Muslim and
Christian, into the field of Middle Eastern studies. The most visible upshot
of these divergent trends was a polarization of the field of Middle Eastern
studies into two opposing camps. One camp, consisting mostly of Christians
and Muslims, has sought to bring greater objectivity to their study of Islam
and Islamic societies. They make an effort to locate Islamic societies in
their historical context, arguing that Islamic responses to Western
challenges have been diverse and evolving over time, and they do not derive
from an innate hostility to the West or some unchanging Islamic mindset. The
second camp, now led mostly by Jews, has reverted to Orientalism's original
mission of subordinating knowledge to Western power, now filtered through
the prism of Zionist interests. This Zionist Orientalism has assiduously
sought to paint Islam and Islamic societies as innately hostile to the West,
modernism, democracy, tolerance, scientific advance, and women's rights.

This Zionist camp has been led for more than fifty years by Bernard Lewis,
who has enjoyed an intimate relationship with power that would be the envy
of the most distinguished Orientalists of an earlier generation. He has been
strongly supported by a contingent of able lieutenants, whose ranks have
included the likes of Elie Kedourie, David Pryce-Jones, Raphael Patai,
Daniel Pipes, and Martin Kramer. There are many foot soldiers, too, who have
provided distinguished service to this new Orientalism. And no compendium of
these foot soldiers would be complete without the names of Thomas Friedman,
Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and
Judith Miller.

In my mind's eye, I try to visualize an encounter between this distinguished
crowd and some of their eminent predecessors, like Hienrich Heine, Abraham
Geiger, Gustav Weil, Franz Rosenthal, and the great Ignaz Goldziher. What
would these pro-Islamic Jews have to say to their descendants, whose
scholarship demeans and denigrates the societies they study? Would Geiger
and Goldziher embrace Lewis and Kedourie, or would they be repelled by the
latter's new brand of Zionist Orientalism?

M. Shahid Alam is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University.

Here, Lewis is exposed for sloppy bookwork:

http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/000791.html

Good luck!
Be sure and tell us his SUCCESSES.

/;^)

::Clark::

[Count 1]

"clark wilkins" <clwi...@prodigy.net> wrote in message

news:10jchl8...@corp.supernews.com...

>
> "Count 1" <omnipi...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:2pjj87F...@uni-berlin.de...
> > > No. I didn't foresee it as working. I had 20-20 foresight. I knew
> Bernard
> > > Lewis was a fraud (The Saudis had already exposed him but the
Zionists,
> in
> > > their fanatiscism, wouldn't listen. But who believes a Saudi?).
> >
> > Bernard Lewis is a fraud because 'the saudis' exposed him?
> >
> > Explain that statement please. Bernard Lewis is one of the worlds most
> > respected, most widely read, most prolific, scholars of Islamic
history.

<snipped irrelevancies>

You're statement was the saudis exposed him - can you show that to be true
or not? I'm not interested in non relevant information.

> > How is he a fraud?

> He over simplifies, ignores contradiction, and has no else confirming his
> work.

He might do the first two things, but his work is well documented and well
'confirmed'. His work - as the preeminent western scholar of Islamic
history - is thoroughly scrutinized by a variety of sources.

I snipped the remainder of the post because it was criticism and not an
exposition of 'fraud'.

So Thanks for all the work, but it had nothing to do with what was
requested?

[kuff (Isaac Adams)]

"Count 1" <omnipi...@yahoo.com> wrote in message

news:2pn01gF...@uni-berlin.de...

Which snippage includes this piece following immediately upon the last piece you
included:

"The Saudis were shown his ideas for democratising Iraq post-Saddam Insane and
they allowed their religious experts to review it and the concluded it would not
work. Their criticisms went ignored."

Not sure I would count this as "the saudis exposed him" to a wide audience but
it does seem to address your question.

[Count 1]

> > I snipped the remainder of the post because it was criticism and not an
> > exposition of 'fraud'.
>
> Which snippage includes this piece following immediately upon the last
piece you
> included:
>
> "The Saudis were shown his ideas for democratising Iraq post-Saddam Insane
and
> they allowed their religious experts to review it and the concluded it
would not
> work. Their criticisms went ignored."
>
> Not sure I would count this as "the saudis exposed him" to a wide audience
but
> it does seem to address your question.

It didn't 'expose' him. The religous 'experts' disagreed with him, but that
example is not an 'exposition'.

The reason Clark couldn't show an exposition is because there is nothing to
expose. Therefore Clark was engaging in propoganda at best, outright lies
at worse.

[clark wilkins]

"Count 1" <omnipi...@yahoo.com> wrote in message

news:2pn2vrF...@uni-berlin.de...

So what you snipped off was "propaganda at best" and "outright lies at
worse"?

If so, prove it.

::Clark::

[Count 1]

"clark wilkins" <clwi...@prodigy.net> wrote in message

news:10jdm8e...@corp.supernews.com...

Sure - easily done. But first lets see if you can prove he was 'exposed by
Saudis'. A reiteration of your original post will not suffice.