To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity’s quest foe real progress.

They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife – but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!

New political systems and philosophies were imported into the Near East under the general term democracy and grafted artificially into a society which was feudal in nature and theocratic in spirit. The results were not happy…

What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen....

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere ‘fringe’ elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—’The Bloc of the Faithful.’ Why not just say ‘Party of God’ and have done with it? At least they didn’t have the...

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been ‘sold’ to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the...

Kiswahili ni lugha ya Kibantu na lugha kuu ya kimataifa ya biashara ya Afrika ya Mashariki ambayo; maneno yake mengi yamepokewa kutoka katika lugha za Kiarabu, Kireno, Kiingereza, Kihindi, Kijerumani na Kifaransa, kutoka kwa wakoloni waliyoitawala pwani ya Afrika ya Mashariki katika kipindi cha karne tano zilizopita.Lugha ya Kiswahili ilitokana na lugha za Kisabaki za...

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as ‘the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.’ But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward’s moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of...

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors...

We believe that Lebanon has been the first real experience for all the Arabs.

No.”And with this his puzzlement increased until he was assured that my fate lies in hell indeed.

Time doesn’t change anything; that is why we still worship asshole Arabs.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan ‘Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less’—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action....

London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; ‘Islamophobic’ to oppose clerics whose first...

What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how...

Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya nchi za Tanzania, Kenya na Uganda. Ni lugha isiyo rasmi ya nchi za Rwanda, Burundi, Msumbiji na Jamhuri ya Kidemokrasia ya Kongo. Lugha ya Kiswahili ni mali ya nchi za Afrika ya Mashariki, si mali ya nchi za Afrika Mashariki peke yake. Pia, Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya Umoja wa...

As politicians weigh courses of action against their political agendas the death toll weighs heavy on the conscience of the world. The once vibrant Syrian streets are now haunted by the souls of the innocent and the historic monuments that told of an unrivalled Arab civilisation no longer stand tall.

…But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of...

The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant...

Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too ‘Western.’ It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably ‘extreme’ nationalists—and Marxists—were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef...

Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these...

People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs, fail to realize that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already, it fell the day MUHAMMED (pbuh) was born.

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath...