Free Republic

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s "Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne" reviewed by Thomas F. BertonneauLong before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance...

Book explores how other cultures perceive the West Wisam Younis of Iraq recently told The Associated Press that his ambition was to kill Americans. So far, all he has managed to do is kill eight of his own countrymen and wound another 80. He's facing murder charges in Iraq and hopefully will never be free to kill again. Elsewhere in the Islamic world, angry crowds are protesting what they say is abuse of the Quran by American interrogators at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One photograph of Muslim protesters in India showed a man with a sign that said,...

Against the West: Islamic Radicals Hate Us for Who We Are, Not What We Do Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (New York: Penguin, 2004), 160 pp. "Why do they hate us?" This plaintive question has been asked so many times since 9/11 that it has become almost cliché-like. What possessed educated young Arab men to turn civilian airliners into cruise missiles to be crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on the banks of the Potomac River? In response, some claim that...

<p>THE essays that make up "Between War and Peace" (most were published in 2002 and 2003), form a robust, even angry counterattack on all those, at home and abroad, who decry U.S. efforts to wage the War on Terror, to create a new and better society in Iraq and to defend Israel. Victor Davis Hanson argues brilliantly; he is a fearsome adversary, and he takes no prisoners.</p>

When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed — not only in America — that the West means the United States. This goes for those on the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or "imperialism") and U.S. corporate power (or "globalization") have brought the suicide bombers and holy warriors upon America by marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit from the capitalist world order. But it also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on "our values," that is,...

American professors have long lectured to our students about purported Western biases and cruel misconceptions toward the "Other." According to Edward Said and other postcolonial critics, much of our dim view of Arabs is a product of an "Orientalism" that was constructed by European intellectuals of the 19th century West — blinkered folk actively engaged as colonialists overseas, and conditioned by an earlier pedigree of prejudice toward the East dating from Herodotus and Aeschylus. According to such supposedly biased and unsophisticated views, Asians and Arabs were considered tribal, emotional, less-sophisticated peoples, prone to violence, fundamentalism, and irrational thinking, simply because...

When the West is under attack, as it was on September 11, it is often assumed -- not only in America -- that the West means the United States. This goes for those on the left, who believe that U.S. foreign policy (or "imperialism") and U.S. corporate power (or "globalization") have brought the suicide bombers and holy warriors upon America by marginalizing and bullying the millions of people who have failed to benefit from the capitalist world order. But it also goes for conservatives, who think that Islamist radicalism, like Communism before, is an attack on "our values," that is,...