Sublime

Said’s book became canonical in many Middle East Studies departments, pressuring students and professors to prove they were not Orientalists. Israel’s history was subjected to withering revisionism.

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.

As someone who had spent several years on American campuses, all of these ideas rang familiar to me. They echoed the sixties’ revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies, and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said’s Orientalism, whi

Devoid of archival sources and tainted with inaccuracies—oil, of course, and not Israel, was America’s Middle East priority—“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” was even less academically sound than Orientalism. Utterly ignored were the vast advantages that Israel afforded the United States in intelligence sharing, weapons development, and hi

showing all Mubarak all the time, by the 2000s had access to more than 400 national and international stations. American movies,

cut both ways.

Edward Said