Sublime

But it was a state that was being prevented by Britain, at the demand of the Arabs, from opening its gates to those refugees most in need.

Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region.

Within days, I replaced him as defense minister as well. The main item in my in-box would not be Lebanon, however. The Mossad had uncovered a threat hundreds of miles farther away: a construction site in northeast Syria along the Euphrates River, where the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear

Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropou

This group, headed by a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden and an Egyptian dissident (and former Muslim Brotherhood member) named Ayman al-Zawahiri, formed an organization dubbed al-Qaeda (“the base” or “the fundamentals”) that, ten years later, would turn its focus away from the corrupt leaders of the Arab and Muslim world—what the Jihadists term t