Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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Just imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if a contemporary German were to explain the collective angst of the modern “Jewish Mind” not primarily in terms of German aggression but rather on the decision of “the Jews,” symbolized by the often superstitious and, at times, misogynist inhabitants of the shtetls, to turn their backs on the brighter paths of development offered them by the surrounding national cultures of Europe?

Rightfully, no one would stand for such a thing. Yet when the victim being blamed is an Arab, it goes largely unnoticed.

The silken-tongued Lewis, who formerly taught at Princeton, is a “renowned” scholar of the Ottoman and Arab worlds. But to read his work is to be told, again and again, variations on the same simple story. It goes something like this: “The Arabs” are underdeveloped socially and politically in contemporary times because of their own penchant for administering self-inflicted wounds. Their inability to face honestly the cost of their Islam-induced failure to embrace modernity (and its child, secularism) has made them pathologically rageful, especially against the Jews and the state of Israel, an entity that merely wishes to live at peace with its neighbors.