To Bernard Lewis: the Crisis of Islam
In your otherwise illuminating book The Crisis of Islam , you present some rather less illuminating argumentation in the two middle chapters (“Discovering America” and “Satan and the Soviets”) to support the following proposition: “The Palestine problem has certainly caused great and growing anger, from time to time renewed and aggravated by policies and actions of Israeli governments or parties. But can it really be, as some contend, the prime cause of [Islamic] anti-Western sentiment?” (81) Your answer of course is “no.” Your argument begins to fall apart on pp. 61-62. After reviewing the undisputed fact that Arab leaders supported the Nazis during WWII and the Soviets during the Cold War, you say: But though these foreign sponsors and imported philosophies provided material help and intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many, in the Middle East and...