 | Knowledge |
|
| |  | East Of |
Gnibo created an article from about 89962 text blocks
This area, first settled in 1664, was one of four Congregational parishes in Simsbury. The Turkey Hills Ecclesiastical Society in 1786 became a section of Granby, and in 1858 was incorporated as the Town of East Granby (www.eastgranby.com....ociety.htm)
Our first event will be held in conjunction with the Ruby East conference. Our Codefest will take place at the same location on the following day, Saturday, September 29th (www.ruby-east.com/rubyeast/)
Understand the basics of the Middle East quickly and objectively: Geography, people, demographics, politics, and history before and after Islam, with emphasis on demystifying the region, eliminating stereotypes and providing illuminating context for issues of the day (middleeast.about.com....st_101.htm)
Seven of the New York Times' 53 "Best Places to Travel in 2008" are in the Middle East, and several of those are surprising choices: what axis of evil (middleeast.about.com....st_101.htm)
The origins of the split between Islam's two major sects, where Sunnis and Shiites are located throughout the Middle East, and how contemporary Islam is struggling through the sectarianism (middleeast.about.com....st_101.htm)
It's not been a good year for the Middle East: continuing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, another humanitarian crisis in Somalia, 4 million Iraqi refugees meandering inside and outside their country, martial law in Pakistan, violence and uncertainty again in Afghanistan, and on the list goes. There were glimmers of hope, too: Iran may not be going nuclear after all and Israelis and Palestinians are talking again, if barely so. Inevitably, a list of the year's top issues is cursory at best, in the sense that it cannot but exclude a whole lot of issues that, in other people's eyes, are just as worthy of making The List (middleeast.about.com....f-2007.htm)
Former Durham Light Infantry soldier Bob Rogers has made an emotional return to the North-East after the death of the wife he met through an incredible twist of fate (www.northeasthistory.co.uk....tory/news/)
A FULL-SIZE replica of a Second World War plane was yesterday lowered into place as a monument to a North-East town57;s aviation heritage. Crowds gathered to watch as a huge crane lifted the replica Spitfire into place on a roundabout in Thornaby, near Stockton . (www.northeasthistory.co.uk....tory/news/)
THE romance of Antony and Cleopatra was immortalised in film by the dashing Richard Burton and beautiful Elizabeth Taylor . But far from the handsome general and his beautiful queen Hollywood would have us believe , the real couple were quite unattractive, North-East experts have discovere (www.northeasthistory.co.uk....tory/news/)
Chariot Solutions is proud to be able to bring some of the topspeakers in the Ruby and Rails communities to our region.This conference is not just for those who already know and love Ruby. Italso features an exceptional lineup for beginners, including JeremyMcAnally's "Humble Little Ruby Talk" and an introductory Rails talk byAmy Hoy. If you have colleagues or friends who are just getting started withRuby or who are have not gotten around to looking into Ruby yet thisis an ideal conference to bring them to.Ruby East will be a valuable experience for anyone who wants to learnmore about Rails or Rub (www.ruby-east.com/rubyeast/)
What would Mitt Romney's policies be regarding the Middle East, terrorism and the war in Iraq? In most cases, the answers are very general, betraying Romney's severely limited foreign policy experience (middleeast.about.com....Policy.htm)
As president, Barack Obama would extend the Middle East an olive branch at the end of a stick: he is the dovish hawk of the Democratic field of 2008 candidates, often looking to have it both ways (middleeast.about.com....Policy.htm)
Heavily influenced by his Cold War experience, McCains Middle East policy is mostly a continuation of existing policies. A heavy and continued military presence in Iraq, striking Iran if necessary, and building up Pakistan militarily. The one word that sums up McCains Middle East and foreign policy is interventionis (middleeast.about.com....Policy.htm)
Anti-Semitism Is Inherent to Arab History Not so. 60;The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities,61; historian Bernard lewis writes in What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response , 60;and can usually be traced back to European originals. They had limited impact, and at the time for example of the Dreyfus trial in France , when a Jewish officer was unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread," as Nazis disseminated European-style anti-Semitism in the Middle East after 1933. (middleeast.about.com....080120.htm)
Compelling Books on the Middle East: It might take the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt to contain the mass of books journalists, historians and local authorities have been publishing on the Middle East going back centuries. Picking a few shouldn't be intimidating. Here are a few good places to start (middleeast.about.com....080201.htm)
Quick, Factual Overview of Oil and the Middle East: Who are the real leaders in oil production? The biggest consumers? The owners of the greatest reserves? Here are the figures (middleeast.about.com....080201.htm)
Country Profiles: Here are the basics on individual countries in the Middle East-demographics, religion, military facts, brief histories and current issues (middleeast.about.com....080201.htm)
Remember the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? The media's automatic response in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was to look for bomb residue beneath every turban or, as Detroit 's Eyewitness News anchorman put it, to keep in mind that the explosion had the Middle East written all over it. (Detroit at the time had 280,000 Arabs. (middleeast.about.com....080220.htm)
Two decades after David Lamb's book was originally published (by Random House in 1987, revised in 2002), it remains a lucid introduction to the main themes of Middle Eastern politics, history and social issues that most westerners find intractabl (middleeast.about.com....st_101.htm)
It's not been a good year for the Middle East: continuing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, another humanitarian crisis in Somalia, 4 million Iraqi refugees meandering inside and outside their country, martial law in Pakistan, violence and uncertainty again in Afghanistan, and on the list goes. There were glimmers of hope, too: Iran may not be going nuclear after all and Israelis and Palestinia (middleeast.about.com....st_101.htm)
Some foods are generally more popular than others. England is famous for fish and chips, Italy for it's pasta dishes, and the Middle East is famous for a few different dishes. Here you will find the most popular and widely recognized Middle eastern dishes and their recipes. (mideastfood.about.com....x_g.01.htm)
Some foods are generally more popular than others. England is famous for fish and chips, Italy for it's pasta dishes, and the Middle East is famous for a few different dishes. Here you will find the most popular and widely recognized Middle eastern dishes and their recipes (mideastfood.about.com....dex.01.htm)
While McCain recognizes the need for America s top military and foreign service experts to develop much greater understanding of Arab, Persian and Asian cultures and languages, his policies toward the Middle East appear indistinct from those of George W. Bush (middleeast.about.com....071122.htm)
And as Reza Aslan (to name one author) pointed out in No God but God: The Origin, Evolution , and Future of Islam (Random House, 2005), it's also worth noting that the Middle East is as much in the grips of a fundamentalist revival as in the grips of an identity crisis that cuts to the heart of its belief systems and its place in the worl (middleeast.about.com....0127_2.htm)
McCain s Middle East policy is mostly a continuation of existing policies. A military presence in Iraq, under a McCain presidency, would likely be longer and more built-up. Military intervention against Iran would be likely, should Iran continue on its present course of acquiring nuclear technology even if that technology were not yielding nuclear weapons. McCain would likely increase military aid to Pakistan (itself an Islamic nuclear power). He would also create, he says, a League of Democracies that would join democratic nations into an alternative to the United Nations: Where the U.N. doesn t or cannot act, McCain s League of Democracy would, whether to intervene militarily or to address humanitarian crises. The one word that sums up McCain s Middle East and foreign policy is this: interventionism. (middleeast.about.com....1122_2.htm)
Arabs Held Hostabe by Religion and Identity Fortunately for the reader, Lamb does most of the work, as in this passage that ably sums up the chasm between the West and the Middle East: (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
The Middle East as a term can be as contentious as the region it identifies. It's not a precise geographical area like Europe or Africa. It's not a political or economic alliance like the European Union. It's not even an agreed-upon term by the countries that constitute it. So what is the Middle East (middleeast.about.com....080208.htm)
Do you have an ancestor who left, say Missouri, for the Gold Rush and never returned? Did your ancestral family then develop a resentment about California? Mine did. California 'stole' relatives who never returned. My eastern relatives thought California had nothing but sinful, wild, gold-digging people who knew nothing of settling down to stable hard work (www.east-cal-pioneers.com/)
The greatest struggle for Middle Easterners isn't the battle against terrorism, or the battle within Islam, or the problem of authoritarianism in most Middle East countries. It's a problem of perception-the many and varied ways westerners misinterpret, mis-characterize, stereotype and flatly misrepresent various people and issues across the greater Middle East. It's important to face the myths head-on, demolish them and correct the record. Here are five of the most common myths. (middleeast.about.com....080120.htm)
The Middle East is Synonymous with the Arab World Not at all. Afghanistan , Iran , Israel and Turkey , to name just four countries, are in the Middle East, but except for Israel57;s Palestinian-Arabs, the majority of their populations are not Arabs. Ethnically, Iran is made up for the most part of Persians and Kurds. Afghanistan57;s population is Pashtun , Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak and Turkmen. A quarter of Israel57;s population is Arab, the rest is Jewish, though from varying backgrounds. Turkey57;s population is either Turkmen or Kurds. Large portions of populations in Arab nations such as Bahrain , the United Arab Emirates , Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not Arabs but mostly Asian laborers. In the UAE57;s case, the majority of the population is non-Ara (middleeast.about.com....080120.htm)
The Middle East and Arab Nations Are Awash in Oil Neither is true. The Arab League adds up to 23 countries (including the Palestinian Authority). The Greater Middle East adds up to more than 30 countries. Of those, only a handful 52; Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Libya, and to a lesser extent Oman 52; are major oil-producing countries. Several Arab and Middle Eastern countries have minor oil deposits, but not in amounts sizable enough to drive their economie (middleeast.about.com....080120.htm)
Or how about the opening paragraph of a piece called Living with Islam in the Economist a year later? Think of Islam, the piece went, and bombs and bigots may come to western minds. Nowadays the word conjures up (un)holy warriors who regard westerners as fair game -French monks in Algeria, Greek tourists in Egypt, American servicemen in Saudi Arabia. When an American airliner blew up over the Atlantic last week, with the loss of 230 lives, thoughts automatically turned to the Islamic Middle East. It was simple to assume-despite Bill Clinton's call for caution-that this too was part of some ghastly blood feud with the West (middleeast.about.com....080220.htm)
So let's not add to the festival of smears. Better return the matter to its substance: the 2008 election , the man's qualities and faults (he has both aplenty, as any ambitious politician would), how he compares to his rivals. Most of all, where he stands on the Middle East, and why it's so tricky for him to take stands, whatever they are. Think Hussein. (middleeast.about.com....080220.htm)
In General: Hillary Rodham Clinton has the reputation of a foreign policy hawk. That s true regarding the Middle East. She originally and unquestioningly supported the Bush administration s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and every supplemental military appropriation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though she called on Congress, in 2007, to repeal the 2002 Iraq War authorization. She would support attacking Iran if Iran developed nuclear weapons. She is staunchly pro-Israel . Nevertheless, Clinton s foreign policy would favor diplomacy, multilateralism and working through international institutions like the United Nations. (middleeast.about.com....071111.htm)
At age 71, John McCain, a fourth-term Republican Senator from Arizona is the second-oldest of all the major candidates for the U.S. presidency in 2008, behind Republican Ron Paul (who s 72). If elected, McCain would be the oldest-ever president to begin a first term (Ronald Reagan began his first term when he was 69). McCain s age and experience as a Vietnam War airman and prisoner of war in Vietnam explains to some extent his rear-view-mirror perspective on foreign policy in general and the Middle East in particular (middleeast.about.com....071122.htm)
Carter Administration, 1977-1981 Jimmy Carter s presidency was marked by American Mid-East policy s greatest victory and greatest loss since World War II. On the victorious side, Carter s mediation led to the 1978 Camp David Accord and the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel , which included a huge increase in U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt. The treaty led Israel to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. The accord took place, remarkably, months after Israel invaded Lebanon for the first time, ostensibly to repel chronic attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization in south Lebanon. (middleeast.about.com....909b_2.htm)
On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian students backed by the new regime took 63 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran hostage. They d hold on to 52 of them for 444 days, releasing them the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The hostage crisis, which included one failed military rescue attempt that cost the lives of eight American servicemen, undid the Carter presidency and set back American policy in the region for years: The rise of Shiite power in the Middle East had begun. (middleeast.about.com....909b_2.htm)
One example: In Lamb s chapter-length treatment of the rise of Arab and Islamic terrorism, he quickly dispels the conventional notion that terrorism is exclusively an Arab or Islamic tactic. I have in my files, Lamb writes, a Photostat of a WANTED poster issued by the British colonial authorities about 1943. It shows the mug shots of ten men hunted as terrorists, pictured in alphabetical order; the first is that of a Polish clerk whose peculiarities are listed as wears spectacles, flat footed, bad teeth. His name was Menahem Begin, and he and his colleague, Ytzhak Shamir, also a suspected terrorist, were to become future prime ministers of Israel . Begin would also become a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the award in 1978 with [Egyptian] President [Anwar] Sadat. In the Middle East the boundaries of respectability are not clearly defined: today s terrorist is tomorrow s statesman (middleeast.about.com....1226_2.htm)
By the end of the book Lamb, saying his farewells to Cairo, returns to his anecdote about the broken toilet. By then it is perhaps a too-obvious and slightly tactless metaphor for the Middle East, which he s spent 325 pages describing and explaining in such a way as to defy any such metaphors. But the fact remains that the Middle East is mostly a mosaic of dysfunctional societies held together by force. The pressure was building 20 years ago. It still is (middleeast.about.com....1226_2.htm)
Delusion and Dislillusion: 1940-1968 The leap from Sykes-Picot's broken promises to Operation Iraqi Freedom isn't a difficult one to make. It's connected by the same thread of assertions on one side and mistrust on the other, beginning with the broken promises of Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Wilson's famous Fourteen Points had made the sovereignty of the various people of the Middle East-Armenians, Kurds, Palestinian Arabs, and so on-a priority. But Wilson allowed Britain and France to outmaneuver him. America, having abandoned its commitment to self-determination, steadily declined in Arab esteem, Viorst writes, undermining the notion that American esteem began declining only during the Bush administration. Arabs replaced esteem for the West with nationalism. (middleeast.about.com....0127_2.htm)
Theocrats, Autocrats and Terrorism With Arab nationalism in tatters, what was to replace it? Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tried a hybrid version of nationalism with a human face, making peace with Israel in 1978 and banking on American aid both to preserve his authority and mitigate Egypt's static poverty. It wasn't enough to prevent the rise of the Middle East latest, and most current, movement: Islamic fundamentalism and its most extreme variant-terroris (middleeast.about.com....0127_2.htm)
Sadat's murder in 1981 was a milestone in the rise of radical Islamic nationalism, Viorst writes. One can question whether Islamic radicalism would have emerged at all had Nasser not so thoroughly discredited Pan-Arabism. At the least, Nasser's failures created an ideological void into which Islamic radicalism poured. For more than a decade after the 1967 debacle, religious radicalism rose incrementally among Arabs, but then huge Islamic waves broke in distant Iran and Afghanistan. Sadat's assassinations signaled that the waters had reached the Arab world and that the Islamic flood was beginning to inundate the Middle East. (middleeast.about.com....0127_2.htm)
That's not a criticism of Storm from the East , but something to keep in mind as readers seek to fill in the many holes in the West's understanding of the Middle East. For that's the unspoken conclusion of Viorst's book: What the West thinks it knows about the Middle East, and what the Middle East is (and has been) really like, are two vastly different stories. The clash is between those two interpretations. If the West were to attempt a greater understanding of Middle Eastern history, perhaps clashes would be fewer, and the discovery of common ground less of a pipe dream (middleeast.about.com....0127_2.htm)
Giuliani is the most pro-Israel candidate in the GOP field. In 2002, he said, Israel is the only outpost of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and the only absolutely reliable friend of the United States. He has not yet developed a coherent policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue. But in sharp contrast with Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wants to restore America s mediation role in the peace process, Giuliani says that [t]oo much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians negotiation that bring up the same issues again and again. For now, Giuliani opposes the creation of another state that will support terrorism, presuming a prospective Palestinian state guilty of terrorism and putting it on Palestinians to prove their innocence first. (middleeast.about.com....1116_2.htm)
Giuliani gained populist notoriety in 1995 when he had Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yaser Arafat ejected from a New York Philharmonic concert at Lincoln Center s Avery Fisher Hall, organized partly by Giuliani to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. Arafat was in town to speak at the United Nations. I would not invite Yasir Arafat to anything, anywhere, anytime, anyplace, Giuliani said. Following the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani accepted a $10 million contribution to the 9/11 victims families from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal (who s also donated $20 million to Harvard and $20 million to Georgetown to advance the study of Islam). The check was cashed, but Giuliani when Bin Talal was quoted saying that the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause. (middleeast.about.com....1116_2.htm)
After deriding operations involving the U.S. military in what he called nation-building, President Bush turned, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, into the most ambitious nation-builder since the days of Secretary of State George Marshall and the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. Bush s efforts, focused on the Middle East, have not been as successful (middleeast.about.com....909b_3.htm)
Bush had the world s backing when he led an attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 to topple the Taliban regime there, which had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda. Bush s expansion of the war on terror to Iraq in March 2003, however, had less backing. Bush saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the first step in a domino -like birth of democracy in the Middle East. (middleeast.about.com....909b_3.htm)
It's not been a good year for the Middle East: continuing genocide in Sudan's Darfur region, another humanitarian crisis in Somalia, 4 million Iraqi refugees meandering inside and outside their country, martial law in Pakistan, violence and uncertainty again in Afghanistan, and on the list goes. There were glimmers of hope, too: Iran may not be going nuclear after all and Israelis and Palestinians are talking again, if barely so. Inevitably, a list of the year's top issues is cursory at best (middleeast.about.com....071224.htm)
8. Turkey Attacking Iraq There are more than 25 million Kurds spread through the Middle East, most of the in Iran, Iraq and Turkey . In Northern Iraq, Kurdistan might as well be an independent nation. Its Kurds behave as if it were. The United States refuses to recognize Kurdistan because ther U.S. doesn't want to upset Turkey , its NATO ally. An independent Kurdistan would encourage militant Kurds in Iraq to press their long battle for autonomy. Lacking that, militants have been battling Turkey from the Iraqui side of the border. In October, Turkey approved military retaliations, including an invasion of the Iraqi zone if necessary. It's a new though not unexpected front in the Iraqi war, and its implications are just beginning to unfold (middleeast.about.com....071224.htm)
In General: Mitt Romney is a Michigan native from a family seeped in business and politics. His father, Georghe W. Romney, was chairman of the American Motors Corporation and governor of Michigan. His mother ran for U.S. Senate (unsuccessfully). Mitt Romney was the CEO of Bain Company, a management consulting firm, and was the CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics before being elected governor of Massachusetts that year. His foreign policy experience is almost non-existent. Of all the major candidates, his positions on Middle East issues are the least precise. (middleeast.about.com....080204.htm)
On the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Romney has never addressed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a policy perspective. He's declared his support for the Separation Barrier Israel is building inside the West Bank and has called on Palestinians to stop acts of terrorism. More often, Romney conflates the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in his vision of a Middle East in the grips of a jihadist war, and sees Palestinians as instruments of Iran or Lebanon's Hezbollah. Speaking before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Florida in January 2007, Romney likened peace-making with Palestinians to appeasing Hitler (middleeast.about.com....080204.htm)
Judging from what his Middle East adviser, Norman Podhoretz, has said, Giuliani believes that nothing short of bombing Iran will prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. That s what Podhoretz believs and outlines in his book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Doubleday, 2007). I was asked to come in and give him a briefing on the war , World War IV, Podhoretz, a staunch neoconservative, told the New York Observer . As far as I can tell there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it. In the Republican presidential debate on Oct. 9, 2007, Giuliani said , we have to be willing to use a military option to stop Iran from becoming nuclear. If we are willing to do it, we have a much better chance of having sanctions work (middleeast.about.com....071116.htm)
David Lamb spent 25 years roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times (and collecting eight Pulitzer-Prize nominations along the way). He spent three of those years 1982-1985 as the Times Middle East bureau chief, based in Cairo. The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage isn t just a summation of those experiences. Two decades after it was originally published (by Random House in 1987, revised in 2002), the book remains a lucid introduction to the main themes of Middle Eastern politics, history and social issues that most westerners find intractable (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
Cairo's Mr. Fix It Soon after arriving in Cairo, Lamb s toilet started gurgling, then overflowing. He d been given the name of a fix-it man, Mr. Darwish, whom he reached by phone after eight or nine tries. Mr. Darwish promised to be there within 10 days. He was there on the 12th. He jiggered the toilet with some string and tape, watched it flush perfectly, and took the equivalent of $10 for his pains. Two weeks later the string broke. Mr. Darwish returned, fixed the toilet again, and took home another $10. And so on for the duration of Lamb s stay. At first Lamb was none too pleased. But just as he eventually learned to set his internal clock to Arab practices Friday off instead of Sunday, waking up each morning before sunrise to the muezzin s call to prayer Lamb learned that he could not hope to understand the Middle East through the prism of western modernism. He would have to understand it on Arab terms, in Arab time (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
Mr. Darwish, he writes, kept repairing my toilet and the toilet kept breaking, and that no longer bothered me. I realized it was never going to function properly. He realized, too, that the Middle East itself was not about to function properly. It s a world of different mentalities and dynamics that cannot be understood in translation alone. Understanding requires getting inside the Arab perspective the way, say, understanding deep space requires a quantum leap past Earth s extremely limited naked-eye perspective. It s possible, but it takes effor (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
Twenty Years Later, No Changes The reason The Arabs is still current more than 20 years after it was researched and written speaks as well of Lamb s perceptive analyses as it speaks ill of the Middle East, if unintentionally so. If one thing can be said with dismaying authority about the region in the last third of the 20th century and the first shards of the 21st, it s that too little is changing there, that the few keep holding on to too much power and wealth while investing too little on education and, with selective exceptions, inviting too little investment, at the expense of too many. (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
Lamb's Blind Spots Iran has substituted one authoritarian regime, that of the Shah, for another, that of the Ayatollahs, although Iran s Shiite revolution continues to be the single-most powerful force for change, much of it negative , some of it misunderstood by the West, in the Middle East. Iran doesn t figure in the book except peripherally, Iran not being an Arab nation; but the exclusion is, I think, one of the book s unfortunate blind spots, Iran being very much part of what defines the Arab world s reactionary dynamics. Lamb doesn t hesitate to devote pages of analysis to the enormous role the Soviets and the Americans were playing in the Middle East. Iran, then as now, has been no less of a player (middleeast.about.com....071226.htm)
A. The Middle East is not a term Middle Easterners gave themselves, but a British term borne of a colonial, European perspective. The term's origins are seeped in controversy for having originally been a European imposition of geographic perspective according to European spheres of influence. East from where? From London . Why Middle ? Because it was half-way between the United Kingdom and India, the Far East (middleeast.about.com....080208.htm)
Originally published in 2006, Milton Viorst s Storm from the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West (Modern Library) is an invaluable, brief survey of Middle Eastern history from the advent of Islam in the 7th century to the still-reverberating effects of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in the first part of the 21st. You d be hard pressed to find a 178-page book that so accessibly summarizes the main currents of Arab history while intelligently analyzing those currents origins in their Arab context or, since the 19th century, as reactions to western designs on the region (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
Milton Viorst's Background Viorst ambitiously aims to answer the basic questions of the Middle East s various conflicts with the West and within itself. He s authoritatively up to the task without oversimplifying it. A journalist by trade (his freelance by-line regularly appeared in the major American news and general interest magazines from the 1970s to the 1990s, and as a staff writer for The New Yorker), this is his sixth book on the Middle East and its religions, going back to Sands of Sorrow: Israel s Journey from Independence (1987). Viorst likes to challenge conventional assumptions. In Sands of Sorrow , he argued that Israel lost its moral advantage over Arab aggression after the 1967 Six-Day War by turning Israel s astounding victory into a license for aggression and occupation with American backing. In Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (1994), he presents an equally searching analysis of the weaknesses in Arab nationalism and contradictions of Arab identity while drawing a portrait of the region s layered politics that defy western stereotype (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
Storms from the West Storm from the East is a synthesis of history and of Viorst s own vast experience in the region, with this lesson as a starting point: For the West to imagine it can impose its values on the East is a huge miscalculation. For the East to imagine the zealotry of its warriors can intimidate the West is naïve. Another lesson is that neither has the power to choose the other s course. That s not so much another lesson as the same lesson differently stated as it has been restated, to the West s and East s chagrin, over the centuries, with neither side yet learning the lesson (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
The title Viorst gives his book, however, is a misnomer. Aside from the rise and rapid spread of Islam to the rim of Europe and the heart of South Asia in the 7th and 8th centuries, and the Mongol invasions of the 13th, the storms Viorst refers to have not been from the East, but almost exclusively from the West, or at least against the East: the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries; the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, British and French colonialism and mandates in the 19th and first part of the 20th century, the Soviet and American proxy war over the Middle East during the Cold War (whether through a series of Arab-Israeli wars or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979), and finally, American hegemony over Iraq and the Arab Peninsula since the first Gulf War in 1991 (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
In other words, it s not the West s freedoms the East resents, but its policies. The resentment is seeped in what Viorst, somewhat too generally, lumps into his first chapter under the heading of Memory a chapter that encompasses 13 centuries, from the rise of Islam during the Prophet Muhammad s lifetime through 1900. Memory is a potent Arab elixir, not without reason. It didn t take long for Islam to establish itself as the world s preeminent civilization. By then the Roman Empire was an ash heap. The Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted each other through war. Islam s expansion succeeded more by default than by design. By the 10th century, Islam was unrivaled (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
Rights never materialized. What Arabs saw beginning in the late 19th century, however, is an influx of Christian missionaries, then, following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the carving up of the Middle East between France and Britain and the drawing of arbitrary boundaries that took no heed of ethnic, religious or tribal groups. Viorst ably describes one of the great modern foundations of Arab mistrust of the West: the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which the British and the French used to establish their hegemony over the region, promising Arab (and Palestinian) sovereignty only to renege on their promise (middleeast.about.com....080127.htm)
When the Middle East scores seven of the New York Times 53 Places to Go in 2008 , for frills and fun no less, including such current and former members of the axis of evil as Iran and Libya, it s either something to celebrate or to write the Council on Foreign Relations about. Is the Mideast going trendy for jet-setters after all (middleeast.about.com....71210a.htm)
The Council makes it a specialty to chronicle the potential threats, cataclysms and thaws the United States faces overseas. Not surprisingly, Middle Eastern roils figure prominently in the Council s quarterly journal . Four of the latest issue s 13 main pieces are Middle East related, a 31 percent ratio or a .308 batting average, if you re in baseball withdrawal. If you include Sens. Hillary Clinton s and John McCain s foreign policy essays, the bulk of which are focused on the Middle East, the ratio approaches 50 percent. (middleeast.about.com....71210a.htm)
Against that, the Times seven favored Middle Eastern destination, out of 53, represents for that much-maligned region an acceptable 13 percent of the world s choicest vacation spots. Not a bad counterpoint. Then again, let s not forget that the likes of Muhammad, Christ and a long run of like-minded prophets before them chose the Middle East rather than, say, the Yukon or the Kuril Islands, to make their mark. There s something inherently attractive about the Middle East, even, if not especially, for the gods. (middleeast.about.com....71210a.htm)
|
Home | About | Add URL
Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Gnibo.com, All rights reserved
|
